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How are AMD & Nvidia such badly run companies?

Gux

Gux

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463
I honestly don't understand it, how is it possible that every new GPU launch is always supply constrained? No matter which month, which year, which decade, the story is always the same...

A new GPU is announced & then 2 weeks later we have the "paper" launch. Then we need another 4-6 before original orders can be fulfilled & another 4-6 weeks before stock is available.

I don't understand how both of these companies operate & why they can never learn from their previous mistakes?
  • They never seem to be able to accurately estimate the actual demand needed.
  • Quality control is always poor initially & general driver instability almost always present.
  • Always fail in being able to produce in enough quantities, no matter if there is pandemic or not.
Always blame the mystical demand, which simply does not exist. GPU's are not a high demand product, they are not iPhones. There should be no excuse why they can never meet the small demand there is.

Apple just released 4 new iPhones along with all of their entry level Macs. We're taking about 10s of million of units that need to be produced each quarter. Apple always delivers year after year with no/minimal delays.

Also why do we need AIB's? Why does this industry need some many middle men between a product being produced & before it gets to the customer hands. Why can't this process be streamlined? These are multi-billion corporations, not being able to do basics things & always failing to learn their lesson.
 
Soldato
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Low supply keeps demand but the most important thing is these shodily ran companies know keeping stock low= zero discount.

When demand drops, they have to discount them to shift them.

If graphics cards ever become bolted to your hands and look cool, then they'd have stock sitting ready.
 
Associate
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It's pretty obvious that they're constrained by manufacturing volume. Investing in larger production would only increase prices.

What benefit is it to the consumer if they pile up stock until they have enough to fulfill the 'estimated' demand? No one would have an Ampere or Big Navi card well into the new year.
 
Caporegime
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25,658
Ok, this may be a longish one, on my iPad so apologies.

To many the 2000 series nvidia cards weren’t a big enough performance jump and so few games used Raytracing that thousands of people who would normally upgrade didn’t. This then meant that when the 3000 series came out the performance jump from even a 1080ti was large and created demand.

Coronavirus meant reduced working on production lines as well as longer shipping times when these were produced. Demand was through the roof, far, far higher than any previous launch. Yes production and availability were relatively low as launches go, but this combined with demand meant huge amounts of demand with hardly any availability.

Also many more people were staying at home and gaming which meant they saw value in upgrading.

These factors created a perfect storm of low production, insatiable demand and huge amounts of desire for the new cards. To say AMD and Nvidia don’t want to sell cards to keep demand high is nonsense. They could sell every card they produce for the next six months. Well, except maybe the Palit Gamerock cards. Them things are Nasty.
 
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Oversell and under make is better than undersell and over make.

Keep demand and hype high and the sales flooding in and produce the numbers after rather than pre-empting to be potentially stuck with stock.
 
Caporegime
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25,658
Oversell and under make is better than undersell and over make.

Keep demand and hype high and the sales flooding in and produce the numbers after rather than pre-empting to be potentially stuck with stock.
While this may be the case for products such as high fashion, AMD and nvidia could easily sell every card they produce for the next six months, even if they managed to increase production. This isn’t some marketing exercise.
 
Soldato
Joined
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2,525
Companies have lost their integrity as the don't care about customer experience since there is no consquence for them.
It's all about marketing, spin and maintaining share price.

From manufacturing perspective, if you have fixed capacity, say 50k per week then you have a choice.

A) Sit on very expensive inventory for months until you have enough for a big launch, or B) launch with minimal inventory.
With A, If you over produce you then have to discount.
Therefore B, Low inventory launch is good for cash flow. For desirable products it keeps prices high and is therefore good for margins which drive the share price and the only real downside is a lot of moaning on the internet until people actually buy one anyway.

Neither company puts you first, they just want your cash and as much of it as they can get.
 

Gux

Gux

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Ok, this may be a longish one, on my iPad so apologies.

To many the 2000 series nvidia cards weren’t a big enough performance jump and so few games used Raytracing that thousands of people who would normally upgrade didn’t. This then meant that when the 3000 series came out the performance jump from even a 1080ti was large and created demand.

Coronavirus meant reduced working on production lines as well as longer shipping times when these were produced. Demand was through the roof, far, far higher than any previous launch. Yes production and availability were relatively low as launches go, but this combined with demand meant huge amounts of demand with hardly any availability.

Also many more people were staying at home and gaming which meant they saw value in upgrading.

These factors created a perfect storm of low production, insatiable demand and huge amounts of desire for the new cards. To say AMD and Nvidia don’t want to sell cards to keep demand high is nonsense. They could sell every card they produce for the next six months. Well, except maybe the Palit Gamerock cards. Them things are Nasty.

I don't really buy that excuse. The high demand has always been a BS excuse in my eyes. Again GPU's are not high demand products, they don't sell 25 million GPU's per quarter do they? Nvidia CEO himself said that 1xxx series owners that it's safe to upgrade. So surely they were expecting a big upgrade cycle this time around?

Again I don't see Coronavirus having a large impact. Simply looking at Apple, they are shipping millions of units world wide & are mostly meeting demand, even though the demand for their products is 1000x higher than for GPU's. Not to mention this GPU shortages happen every time there is a new GPU available. Pandemic or not.

The issue here is low production & too many pointless middle men in the process. It's a simple issue to fix, but something Nvidia & AMD clearly do not have the understanding to fix.
 

Gux

Gux

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AMD's share price in last 2 years has gone from $17 to $85.... Intel's has stayed about the same over same period.

That says more about Intel than anything else. Intel has been standing still for nearly 10 years & only now have AMD surpassed them....

AMD finally competitive in GPU space after half a decade being in the wilderness & now they don't have any stock to sell. Yes badly run company indeed.
 

Gux

Gux

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Will be interesting to see how Apple do with their own GPU designs. I fully expect that in 5 years they will smash Nvidia & AMD in GPU performance, just a shame they will only be for Macs
 

Gux

Gux

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Companies have lost their integrity as the don't care about customer experience since there is no consquence for them.
It's all about marketing, spin and maintaining share price.

From manufacturing perspective, if you have fixed capacity, say 50k per week then you have a choice.

A) Sit on very expensive inventory for months until you have enough for a big launch, or B) launch with minimal inventory.
With A, If you over produce you then have to discount.
Therefore B, Low inventory launch is good for cash flow. For desirable products it keeps prices high and is therefore good for margins which drive the share price and the only real downside is a lot of moaning on the internet until people actually buy one anyway.

Neither company puts you first, they just want your cash and as much of it as they can get.

Agree it's really a shame we have this duopoly. This upgrade round has really soured my experience of PC gaming, to the point of where I'm really considering going with Consoles. Should be 0 excuse for this to keep on happening year after year.
 
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If you can sell everything you make and at a higher price than msrp you are in fact a very well run company.

There are some dodgy things going on though to keep prices high. MLID has been saying the nvidia are supplying 3080s to mining companies once the stock levels increase to keep prices high
 
Associate
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it aint nvidia or amd raising prices, that is the retailers taking advantage. nvidia and amd have learnt how to to make sure they don't have to much stock available though which makes thing worse..
 
Associate
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120
Ok, this may be a longish one, on my iPad so apologies.

To many the 2000 series nvidia cards weren’t a big enough performance jump and so few games used Raytracing that thousands of people who would normally upgrade didn’t. This then meant that when the 3000 series came out the performance jump from even a 1080ti was large and created demand.

Coronavirus meant reduced working on production lines as well as longer shipping times when these were produced. Demand was through the roof, far, far higher than any previous launch. Yes production and availability were relatively low as launches go, but this combined with demand meant huge amounts of demand with hardly any availability.

Also many more people were staying at home and gaming which meant they saw value in upgrading.

These factors created a perfect storm of low production, insatiable demand and huge amounts of desire for the new cards. To say AMD and Nvidia don’t want to sell cards to keep demand high is nonsense. They could sell every card they produce for the next six months. Well, except maybe the Palit Gamerock cards. Them things are Nasty.
I presume most people understand that part, what is unfathomable is the lack of awareness from AMD and Nvidia about expected demand. They both produced a card providing significant performance increases over the best GPU that money can buy with a price point of roughly 40 / 50% cheaper and no one stopped think, hang on there could be a big market for these things.... :confused::rolleyes:

OR both parties knew full well that there would be effectively zero stock and did a paper/vapour launch. Either way, it's a shambles.
 

Gux

Gux

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OP
Joined
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Posts
463
If you can sell everything you make and at a higher price than msrp you are in fact a very well run company.

There are some dodgy things going on though to keep prices high. MLID has been saying the nvidia are supplying 3080s to mining companies once the stock levels increase to keep prices high

It's the opposite, you're a badly run company, with no vision for the future. All of this low stock & high prices they have been pushing for years does nothing but hold back PC gaming market. A market which could be 5x bigger than what is currently is, if these companies offered good products at good prices with good stock levels.

A bigger customer base is always better than a smaller customer base. Case in point Nvidia CEO telling Pascel customers it's safe to upgrade. Looked like people did not upgrade to the poor value 2xxx series?
 
Last edited:
Caporegime
Joined
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25,658
It's the opposite, you're a badly run company, with no vision for the future. All of this low stock & high prices they have been pushing for years does nothing but hold back PC gaming market. A market which could be 5x bigger than what is currently is, if these companies offered good products at good prices with good stock levels.

A bigger customer base is always better than a smaller customer base. Case in point Nvidia CEO telling Pascel customers it's safe to upgrade. Looked like people did not upgrade to the poor value 2xxx series?

Given that you needed to go for a 2080 or 2080ti to really give a meaningful performance boost over a 1080ti, many didn't upgrade which meant a double whammy of demand for 3000 series.
 
Man of Honour
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13 Oct 2006
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90,820
I don't really buy that excuse. The high demand has always been a BS excuse in my eyes. Again GPU's are not high demand products, they don't sell 25 million GPU's per quarter do they? Nvidia CEO himself said that 1xxx series owners that it's safe to upgrade. So surely they were expecting a big upgrade cycle this time around?

Again I don't see Coronavirus having a large impact. Simply looking at Apple, they are shipping millions of units world wide & are mostly meeting demand, even though the demand for their products is 1000x higher than for GPU's. Not to mention this GPU shortages happen every time there is a new GPU available. Pandemic or not.

The issue here is low production & too many pointless middle men in the process. It's a simple issue to fix, but something Nvidia & AMD clearly do not have the understanding to fix.

Combined AMD and nVidia can sell up to 25 million add-in GPUs a quarter and those cores have to be made somewhere and semi-conductor fabrication is expensive and risky.

nVidia utilises the likes of Foxconn and Digital River, etc. for the assembly and distribution of their own products who can scale up to global levels of demand but the bottleneck is the production of the cores and that is not so simply fixed - you are talking cutting edge facilities that cost billions to get up and running and exceedingly costly to increase capacity.

Often with a new GPU launch it is based on a bleeding edge node and it takes a few months for process maturity and higher output levels to be realised and no company is going to sit on expensive inventory that long or even could afford to.
 
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