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Are Nvidia and AMD price fixing again?

LambChop said:
That's really the only, way, dont buy it, but not everyone would do it enough to make any difference. People have the power of the world in their hands but will never use it.

Petrol prices too high ? Dont fill up your car, can you imagine the price it would come down to if no-one filled ?
GPU's too expensive, dont buy.
Train travel too expensive - dont travel on trains.

It would only take a matter of days and you would see immediate changes.
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whilst that can work for luxury items i am not sure what peoples boss would say if they were told, "sorry boss i am not coming in today because i am not using the train and i cant fill up with fuel!" ;)

there are people in power who can maybe force the issue sometimes, like bringing the entire sector of a country to its knees by holding employees jobs to ransom until they get money for a certain wall to be built.... but not many of us have that power.
 
bigmike20vt said:
whilst that can work for luxury items i am not sure what peoples boss would say if they were told, "sorry boss i am not coming in today because i am not using the train and i cant fill up with fuel!" ;)

there are people in power who can maybe force the issue sometimes, like bringing the entire sector of a country to its knees by holding employees jobs to ransom until they get money for a certain wall to be built.... but not many of us have that power.
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No, because your boss would be at home too :)
 
opethdisciple said:
But this was the story with Vega. How much time do they need. They've had time to get the product right already.
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But arguably not the money. Besides, time alone means nothing. Intel have had more than enough time to get their 10nm sorted out, but they still haven't. Sometimes you just hit a massive hurdle that takes forever to work out.

opethdisciple said:
Time isn't the reason. It's actually a design choice.
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Well yeah, of course it's a design choice because Radeon 7 isn't a new product. It's a repurposed MI50 to serve as a short term PR stunt. Nvidia put out a stupid price for the 2080, AMD saw that the MI50 with some clock tweaks could get about the same raster performance so reclaimed some defective dies or overstock to have a quick slice of that overpriced pie and to keep the "first to 7nm" train rolling.

The "design choice" comes with Navi. The "design choice" comes with Arcturus.

If AMD still can't get it right next year with Arcturus then complaints are valid, because they will have had both time and money to "get it right".
 
Tom B said:
Just found my email:

Code: 
You have ordered the following items:
Item: BFG 8800GTX OC2 768MB GDDR3 Dual DVI HDTV Out HDCP enabled PCI-E Graphics Card
Qty: 1Cost: 301.91

Sorry it was from a competitor :p Though looking at it again, it was September 2007 and without VAT, so ~£350 with VAT 10 months after launch but it was one of the more expensive models I seem to recall.
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The card was 1 year old already :P Ofc it was cheap as it was surpassed by a newer model...... :P
 
StriderX said:
AMD releasing a similarly high priced card probably because the bar was set high enough for the VII to be sorta viable and the pointless confusion with the 2060 SKU's is maybe involved.
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opethdisciple said:
AMD had such an opportunity here. Obviously they have their reasons for sticking with HBM2 but lets say they had gone with GDDR6 this would allow them to manufacture at a cheaper price and they could have really under cut Nvidia and made a killing.

Feels like a missed opportunity.

They know how to do it to Intel but seemly pass up the opportunity to do it to Nvidia.

Mistake.
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AMD Radeon VII is not a proper chip. Is failed (cut down) GPU that cannot be used on MI60 or MI50 products.
And this failure appears AFTER the HBM is strapped on the substrate, interposers etc. So it cannot be reversed back and remove HBM etc.

So for AMD the question is do they throw $500+ into the trash bin, or salvage it by strapping a heatsink and sell it recouping as much money as possible?
(16GB HBM2 alone costs more than $300 to AMD)

There is no mistake, or missed opportunity, or price fixing. Just simple logic of losing a lot of money or trying to lose as much less as possible or better break even on re purposing a product
 
Panos said:
The card was 1 year old already :p Ofc it was cheap as it was surpassed by a newer model...... :p
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Not really, there was no new generation out only the Ultra. At best the modern equivalent of 8800GTX vs Ultra would be the an x80ti vs the equivalent titan card. But that's not really a fair comparison either as the GTX had the same amount of memory and that OC2 version I had was the same clock speeds as the Ultra anyway. There's a reason people still talk about the 8800GTX and not the Ultra.
 
Tom B said:
Not really, there was no new generation out only the Ultra. At best the modern equivalent of 8800GTX vs Ultra would be the an x80ti vs the equivalent titan card. But that's not really a fair comparison either as the GTX had the same amount of memory and that OC2 version I had was the same clock speeds as the Ultra anyway. There's a reason people still talk about the 8800GTX and not the Ultra.
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I am thinking about the 8800gt here, that was a really good card for the money back then.
 
Tom B said:
Not really, there was no new generation out only the Ultra. At best the modern equivalent of 8800GTX vs Ultra would be the an x80ti vs the equivalent titan card. But that's not really a fair comparison either as the GTX had the same amount of memory and that OC2 version I had was the same clock speeds as the Ultra anyway. There's a reason people still talk about the 8800GTX and not the Ultra.
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8800GT was the better card, not the Ultra.
 
Tom B said:
Just found my email:

Code: 
You have ordered the following items:
Item: BFG 8800GTX OC2 768MB GDDR3 Dual DVI HDTV Out HDCP enabled PCI-E Graphics Card
Qty: 1Cost: 301.91

Sorry it was from a competitor :p Though looking at it again, it was September 2007 and without VAT, so ~£350 with VAT 10 months after launch but it was one of the more expensive models I seem to recall.
Click to expand...

Panos said:
The card was 1 year old already :p Ofc it was cheap as it was surpassed by a newer model...... :p
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My BFG 8800 GTX was £329.99 ex VAT in December '06 from OcUK. :cool:
 
Yeah, the Vega 2 card is a pure compute card, it was made purely for compute, it's also a pipecleaner 7nm product and a shrink. It has very expensive memory doubled and a 1TB/s bandwidth which increases the cost again. It's designed for the professional market full stop. It happens to be faster for gaming so AMD said why not make it available. It's not optimised or efficient for gaming.

It's also retaining full FP64 performance like previous Pro cards except at a cheaper price. It offers I think 6.4TF of FP64 performance, Titan V is 7TF in the pci-e version, similar 'home' compute cards cost 3-4 times as much with about the same performance. This card was never meant to be an optimised or cheap gaming card. It's a straight compute card designed for that market and having more expensive memory for that reason. Because of the shrink it happens to be a bit faster for gaming and frankly they've made it available pretty damn cheap considering thy can sell pretty much every one as a expensive Professional card at a far higher price. They are basically giving people an option to get a higher performance card maybe not far off cost because hell, they are making it and why not.

If you think all that means AMD is price fixing with nvidia, because a product that has reasons to be expensive and is being sold with likely very low margins to give AMD users another option then frankly you're crazy.

If this was like previous home compute cards it would cost $1000, at $700 the difference is it probably (yet to be seen) won't have pro driver support but maybe it will, which actually makes this one of the cheapest ever cheap compute cards. IF it doesn't have pro driver compatibility then it's just a cheaper option for those doing compute that write their own software and don't need pro support for specific packages and there are a lot of people who fill that area. For those again who happen to want a faster card and it works for them, great. But this isn't years of optimisation to bring the cheapest gaming card, this is a product aimed and having an increased cost to produce for a different market that happened to end up faster for gaming. It's not amazing price performance, but it was never aiming or put a single second into trying to be that during development.

It's hilarious because 5-6 months ago when AMD were talking about Vega 7nm as a pro only card all about compute people were saying along the lines of "but it will be faster due to faster clocks, why not release a gaming version".... so AMD did, released a gaming version of a card potentially close to cost and people still go nuts over it.

I'm not buying one, Navi will offer far higher price/performance. I'm expecting similar performance at almost half the price from the first Navi and maybe 70-80% higher performance from a big Navi later on when a bigger die becomes viable. Those will offer huge price/performance gains that we want from new generations.

If someone wants 25-35% higher performance and doesn't want Nvidia then they have an option, better than not having the option.
 
opethdisciple said:
AMD had such an opportunity here. Obviously they have their reasons for sticking with HBM2 but lets say they had gone with GDDR6 this would allow them to manufacture at a cheaper price and they could have really under cut Nvidia and made a killing.

Feels like a missed opportunity.

They know how to do it to Intel but seemly pass up the opportunity to do it to Nvidia.

Mistake.
Click to expand...

Vega was built from the ground up to use HBM memory. Changing the memory configuration of Vega to use GDDR instead of HBM would have needed a complete redesign as well as completely new drivers. It would have cost AMD a fortune.

It's only a stop gap card to get rid of chips that didn't make the cut for the Instinct cards. This is AMD creating opportunity out of nothing. They had a chance to release a card with minimum effort and investment and they took it.
 
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