Speculation - AMD isn't going to be able to offer really competitive PC (4K) or console performance until they have GPUs with >100 Compute Units

[KompuKare]

And it will only use 1500 watts and plug directly into the wall, great deal

That's assuming that a 4-chiplet design would be running at the same limits as the current 7900 XTX - that is: as fast as we can (over)clock it!

A 4-chiplet design running at far saner clocks would be more like 2 x 200W or so. Still crazy but not totally mad.

Even Nvidia dGPU revenue for gaming was barely higher than AMD console revenue a few months ago. Sure it's higher margin but the fact is that consoles are much lower risk. During the pandemic it was quite clear AMD was more interested in selling CPUs and console SOCs,instead of pushing wafers towards dGPUs.

Now who would have thought that a CEO who is so hard to work with that various companies refuse to work with them (Microsoft, Sony, Apple), would have a cost.

Never believed that nonsense about

"the console margins are so thin, we refuse to contemplate them"

No, Nvidia had two far more important major hurdles to making it into the consoles:

1. Their CPU is far too slow.
2. Both Sony and Microsoft had already made bad experience with them and had probably vowed never to work with them again.

The we wouldn't even try story was just PR nonsense.

 

[Grim5]

Sony has sold 20 million PS5 consoles in last 12 months and the revenue from selling the SoC the PS5 to Sony makes up 60% of Radeon revenue.

Using AMDs published Radeon segment revenue from here for last year https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wir...quarter-and-full-year-2022-financial-results/

We can calculate that AMD makes $80 per PS5 console sold

 

[humbug]

Sony has sold 20 million PS5 consoles in last 12 months and the revenue from selling the SoC the PS5 to Sony makes up 60% of Radeon revenue.

Using AMDs published Radeon segment revenue from here for last year https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wir...quarter-and-full-year-2022-financial-results/

We can calculate that AMD makes $80 per PS5 console sold

And that's all profit as it the design, the IP that they are selling, not physical hardware.

Sony have them made at TSMC and pay for that.

 

[Murphy]

What AMD needs (for gaming) is dedicated RT cores rather than the hybrid approach of RDNA 2 & 3. Otherwise they are already competitive in raster, 4K, light RT hybrid, cost-wise etc. and as for consoles they're more than competitive - they're the only game in town!

They currently don't think the extra die space taken up by that is worth the cost and i have to say i agree with them, obviously only Nvidia know for sure but estimates put the added die area in the range of 10-30% or more. If, as Jensen would have us believe, Moore's law is dead and the days of more performance for less cost are over i wouldn't want to be spending 10-30% of that budget on a feature that's only really of use in *0.0001% of games.

*That's a total guess but it must be tiny considering there's probably hundreds of thousands games.

 

[Poneros]

They currently don't think the extra die space taken up by that is worth the cost and i have to say i agree with them, obviously only Nvidia know for sure but estimates put the added die area in the range of 10-30% or more. If, as Jensen would have us believe, Moore's law is dead and the days of more performance for less cost are over i wouldn't want to be spending 10-30% of that budget on a feature that's only really of use in *0.0001% of games.

*That's a total guess but it must be tiny considering there's probably hundreds of thousands games.

I don't think that's why. My bet is they simply had a strict schedule as to what they wanted to achieve (in particular with a focus on consoles & APUs, and keeping healthy profit margins for desktop retail) and simply couldn't do it all, so they had to choose to double-down on their strengths rather than try to catch-up to Nvidia and shore up a weakness; plus it's decisions made years in advance that can't really be changed. I have no doubt they will add their own specialised hardware unit for RT, just like they've started shoring up their weakness for AI & ML with RDNA 3.

As for RT in games, most AAA releases are featuring it to some degree, even on consoles, so there's no doubt it's important.

 

[Woodsta888]

I thought that lots of titles like Cyberpunk 2077 only ran at ~30 FPS (4K resolution) on consoles?

EDIT - According to Digital Foundry "For both consoles, ray-tracing mode is locked 2560x1440 at 30fps".

I suppose the answer is that it depends. The Witcher Next gen on Series X can do 4K + 60 FPs in performance mode (with dips to 50 FPS in some areas):

The Witcher 3: Next Gen Update - Xbox Series X Gameplay + FPS Test

The Witcher 3 Xbox Series X Next Gen Update Gameplay FPS Test ResolutionReady to experience The Witcher 3 Next Gen Update on the Xbox Series X? Join us as...

youtu.be

But, 30 FPS when ray tracing is enabled (with dips below 30). So, I imagine this is something that Sony and Microsoft would want to be improved for refreshed consoles.

In my opinion, RT is not worth the hit you take to performance on current generation consoles.

The resolutions and fps you quote really do, interestingly, show how the PC master race has moved on. I remember reading Custom PC magazine from the beginning. 30fps was considered 'playable'.....at 1080p!

So cards were rated against that goal.

Different resolution maybe, but today, fps with a mainstream 4k60hz panel is what consoles are made for, as most aren't 120hz?

4k@120hz via 3080+ - 6800XT+ cards in most, to fairly recent games, is completely possible, particularly with DLSS 2.0+FSR, I think.

 

[Hotwired]

And that's all profit as it the design, the IP that they are selling, not physical hardware.

Sony have them made at TSMC and pay for that.

Never thought about that part of AMD doing chips for other companies.

I had assumed AMD was physically involved past the design stage but they don't have a fab do they.

Sell customers the design to take to the 3rd party fab and collect royalties, living the dream

 

[g67575]

I'm wondering if a 104 compute unit GPU for consoles (exactly 2x what the Series X has) would even be considered viable, assuming about the same clock frequency and decent power consumption. I think they could reduce power consumption by around 50% or more, by switching from a 7nm design to the N3E fabrication process (or similar), which should be ready for production by early 2024, if TSMC can keep to their schedule.

So, that suggests they could keep power usage at around 200w for the whole SOC (the Series X SOC already seems remarkably power efficient, with ~211w max usage recorded for the whole console during gameplay), perhaps slightly higher if they include 16GB of (higher bandwidth) GDDR6 instead of 10GB.

I'm guessing the transistor count would be at least double that of the Series X's SOC (15.3 billion), so > 30.6 billion transistors. RDNA4 compute units and an updated CPU generation would add to the total transistor count.

We can see that there's an increase in transistor count from RDNA2 and RDNA3, even when comparing 2 GPU dies with the same compute unit count:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-navi-23.g926
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/amd-navi-33.g1001

I wonder if that would mean at least 2x the cost for a 104 Compute Unit SOC, assuming similar die yields on N3E, compared to what can currently be achieved on TSMC's 7nm?

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Never thought about that part of AMD doing chips for other companies.

I had assumed AMD was physically involved past the design stage but they don't have a fab do they.

Sell customers the design to take to the 3rd party fab and collect royalties, living the dream

They licenced RDNA2 to Samsung.

 

[JediFragger]

I'm wondering if a 104 compute unit GPU for consoles

 

[g67575]

Do you guys think a console GPU with twice the compute units of the Series X SOC would be too expensive to mass produce for consoles, on a much lower power fabrication process like N3E, in 2024 or perhaps a bit later in 2025?

I was thinking that they may decide to use this kind of GPU with the 'Pro' versions of the Series X and PS5... I guess they could charge a bit more, I'm sure some people would pay an extra £100 for a 'Pro' console.

 

[Emlyn_Dewar]

If it had twice the compute units of the Series X, they'd be paying a quite a bit over £100 more .

 

[g67575]

Well, £550 is a lot for a console.

I wonder how many would be willing to pay for a console with an MSRP of £600?

 

[NZXT30]

Do you guys think a console GPU with twice the compute units of the Series X SOC would be too expensive to mass produce for consoles, on a much lower power fabrication process like N3E, in 2024 or perhaps a bit later in 2025?

I was thinking that they may decide to use this kind of GPU with the 'Pro' versions of the Series X and PS5... I guess they could charge a bit more, I'm sure some people would pay an extra £100 for a 'Pro' console.

There will not be pro versions this time around. Microsoft is still experiencing severe supply issues.

 

[CuriousTomCat]

Never thought about that part of AMD doing chips for other companies.

I had assumed AMD was physically involved past the design stage but they don't have a fab do they.

Sell customers the design to take to the 3rd party fab and collect royalties, living the dream

Living the dream? The blueprints don't fall out the sky and onto AMDs lap.

It probably costs over £500,000,000 to design an architecture. Imagine spending half a billion on a design that only 8% of gamers will buy? I have no idea when AMD will break even on the current gen but I couldn't handle the stress of being CEO.

 

[g67575]

There will not be pro versions this time around. Microsoft is still experiencing severe supply issues.

Are you sure?

Seems like it's possible to buy Series X consoles at MSRP now, without difficulty. Presumably, the majority of people who wanted to buy a series X now have one, so now Microsoft and some retailers seem to have some spare inventory.

 

[Raelgun]

There will not be pro versions this time around. Microsoft is still experiencing severe supply issues.

There is no supply issues for anything.

Only people who believe Nvidia for the high pricing are in this camp.

You can pick up any consoles and GPUs and we all know Nvidia and AMD are holding inventory to drip feed and artificially create a false supply issue.

People who analysed the early days of the iPhone craze where they went out of stock agreed that apple witheld stock to create a buzz

 

[welshrat]

Well, £550 is a lot for a console.

I wonder how many would be willing to pay for a console with an MSRP of £600?

I would.

 

[Hotwired]

There is no supply issues for anything.

Only people who believe Nvidia for the high pricing are in this camp.

You can pick up any consoles and GPUs and we all know Nvidia and AMD are holding inventory to drip feed and artificially create a false supply issue.

People who analysed the early days of the iPhone craze where they went out of stock agreed that apple witheld stock to create a buzz

I think you're correct that there isn't a supply issue but wrong about withholding stock. They are withholding a price drop.

When we had the AMD "undershipping" story craze, what you're saying is what was assumed. But that's not what it meant.

It meant that the partners were slashing their orders from AMD to correct the amount of stock they are holding so they wouldn't get drowned in unsold product by buying more from AMD than they could sell.

Nvidia is known to be holding inventory but they don't want to be holding it. They are holding it because:

- partners won't buy more than they can sell to customers
- customers won't buy more at these prices
- Jensen would rather eat **** than lower prices because this will affect the price they can launch the next and next cards at
- Nvidia already had tons of chips made

It's a hard life being Nvidia CEO, what's he going to do with literal tons of excess silicon without crashing the price and therefore profit of the graphics card market

AMD has a fraction of the dGPU market that Nvidia has so it has a fraction of the problem and can keep selling CPUs/console chips no matter what stupidity happens to dGPUs. If Nvidia insists that cards are worth silly money then AMD is just going to price match, it's free money and just like Nvidia they owe their shareholders maximum profit.

 

[Alt0153]

I think you're correct that there isn't a supply issue but wrong about withholding stock. They are withholding a price drop.

When we had the AMD "undershipping" story craze, what you're saying is what was assumed. But that's not what it meant.

It meant that the partners were slashing their orders from AMD to correct the amount of stock they are holding so they wouldn't get drowned in unsold product by buying more from AMD than they could sell.

Nvidia is known to be holding inventory but they don't want to be holding it. They are holding it because:

- partners won't buy more than they can sell to customers
- customers won't buy more at these prices
- Jensen would rather eat **** than lower prices because this will affect the price they can launch the next and next cards at
- Nvidia already had tons of chips made

It's a hard life being Nvidia CEO, what's he going to do with literal tons of excess silicon without crashing the price and therefore profit of the graphics card market

AMD has a fraction of the dGPU market that Nvidia has so it has a fraction of the problem and can keep selling CPUs/console chips no matter what stupidity happens to dGPUs. If Nvidia insists that cards are worth silly money then AMD is just going to price match, it's free money and just like Nvidia they owe their shareholders maximum profit.

so tldr they are witholding stock to keep prices artificially high, gotcha