[HN Gopher] AMD deprioritizing flagship gaming GPUs: Jack Hyunh ...
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       AMD deprioritizing flagship gaming GPUs: Jack Hyunh on New Strategy
       vs. Nvidia
        
       Author : pella
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2024-09-08 17:32 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
        
       | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
       | This sounds like MBA think vs reality.
       | 
       | A lot of the people who are buying mid-range GPUs are asking
       | their hardcore gamer friends with high-end GPUs for advice about
       | what to buy.
       | 
       | If AMD isn't competing at the high end, they are missing out on a
       | very valuable funnel for mid-range GPUs
        
         | hypothesis wrote:
         | I'm not so sure, his comments about PlayStation 5 do sound like
         | practical reality.
        
       | Farfignoggen wrote:
       | The Majority of the gaming market's TAM is in mainstream GPUs and
       | not Flagship GPUs! And all of Nvidia's Large Monolithic Graphics
       | oriented GPU die Tape-Outs are for the Professional Graphics
       | Workstation market first and foremost with some limited number of
       | those Large GPU die samples not making the binning grade for Pro
       | Workstation market usage and so that gets binned down for
       | Flagship Consumer gaming!
       | 
       | And both AMD and Intel lack much of any larger Professional
       | Graphics Workstation Market presence and the Pro Markups to
       | justify that kind of investment for giant monolithic GPU Die
       | Tape-Outs for Pro Graphics Workstations!
       | 
       | Take Nvidia's GP102 tape-out from the past as an example and that
       | Giant tape-out had more Quadro Branded SKUs and only one consumer
       | branded binning, the GTX 1080Ti! And it's the same for Nvidia's
       | later generations where that's for Quadro/A-series branded Pro
       | Graphics workstation GPUs where Nvidia "__102" Tape-Outs are
       | mostly Quadro/A series(The A series branding has supplanted
       | Quadro branding for Nvidia Pro Graphics Workstation GPUs).
        
         | kcb wrote:
         | I don't know about that. It wasn't long ago that gaming
         | dominated Nvidia's revenue. Professional non-datacenter GPUs
         | were never really on top. No doubt in my mind the 1080ti, as it
         | was basically a legendary gaming GPU, sold many multiple more
         | units than all those Quadro SKUs combined. So I would say the
         | truth is the opposite, the majority of the GP102s were binned
         | as 1080ti with the exceptional few as Quadros.
         | 
         | Example: https://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-
         | content/uploads/2019/11/NVIDIA-Q...
        
           | Farfignoggen wrote:
           | GP102 had more Quadro/Pro Branded SKUs/Binnings and one
           | consumer SKU for the runt die samples that did not make the
           | binning grade to get branded Quadro and so that became the
           | 1080Ti. And the more than one 1080Ti variant was because that
           | was VRAM capacity and memory clocks related for market
           | segmentation reasons!
           | 
           | And then Nvidia created Volta for the Data Center and AI as
           | that had the first generation Tensor cores in a GPU.
           | 
           | TU102 was the same and for Quadro at the high end with some
           | consumer binning as well and even the top end TU104 was
           | initially reserved for Quadro until the Turing generation
           | cards were getting ready to be replaced by the Ampere cards.
           | And the Top end TU104 binning eventually was released for
           | gaming usage(under the Super or Ti Branding).
           | 
           | Nvidia's Pro Graphics Workstation market domination has given
           | Nvidia the funding to create those Giant Monolithic Tape-Outs
           | and Billions for the mask-sets for that every generation. And
           | maybe the gaming revenues were large relative to non gaming
           | at one time but not any longer and most all of Nvidia's later
           | acquisitions of other companies were for the Data Center
           | Market and not consumer/gaming!
           | 
           | Gamers have some sort of collective Myopia with regards to
           | Nvidia's focus on gaming only and gamers! And Nvidia's/Tech
           | Press's marketing focus helped establish the appearance of
           | Nvidia as a gaming only company. But look at Jensen's
           | Keynotes over the last many years and even at consumer/gaming
           | focused events and Jensen's Keynotes were/are mostly
           | AI/Enterprise and cloud services focused, much to the chagrin
           | of gamers!
        
             | kcb wrote:
             | Go check how many second hand 1080 TIs are on the market vs
             | all GP102 Quadros and Teslas. I think the myopia is in the
             | other direction. Counting SKUs is not evidence of unit
             | sales.
        
             | phil21 wrote:
             | Do you have any references for this? Given the basic
             | hacking on GPUs I was doing during that era, my memory
             | leads me to believe the binning was pretty much in the
             | opposite direction than as you describe.
             | 
             | I'm not a major gamer, so I don't believe I have any myopia
             | on this topic in that manner. As far as I can recall
             | though, the GPUs with the heaviest overclocking capacity
             | (including memory) were the flagship gaming GPUs and not
             | the workstation Quadro based stuff. Volume was certainly in
             | the gaming favor though and I don't believe it to be even
             | close. SKU count is more or less irrelevant.
             | 
             | My memory is certainly fallible and I was not as knee deep
             | on the nvidia side during that era so I could very well be
             | wrong. This goes against everything I remember from the
             | firmware and overclocking side though. I don't know why
             | nvidia would have started locking down firmware so hard to
             | keep the "pro" features locked into the workstation SKUs if
             | it was an actual hardware binning situation vs. artificial
             | crippling. This was right around the time that they started
             | to really get into the datacenter space so it could be
             | simple coincidence.
        
       | nothercastle wrote:
       | They should absolutely be pushing the OEM gaming market. Every
       | low end 600-900$ pc should be bundled with a Radeon and not a
       | 4060. If they can hit that for a couple years they will be king
       | of the hill eventually because all developers will have to test
       | and optimize for amd. Then it's just a matter of rolling out a
       | high end card to take advantage.
       | 
       | The problem for AMD is that the 4060 mobile is an absolute killer
       | laptop card. AMD needs a low power consumption high power apu to
       | compete.
        
         | kolinko wrote:
         | Not if the rest of the PC market goes the way of Apple - where
         | with M chips you dob't need a separate card to do decent gaming
        
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