AMD Announces the Radeon R9 Nano Graphics Card

[jboydgolfer]

why would they set the price SO high? if its PROJECTED to be as, or Slightly faster than a 980, then Price it accordingly, NOT $150 more...it looks like AMD id going to screw up theyre last chance @ a decent summer/fall.

 

[HumanSmoke]

why would they set the price SO high? if its PROJECTED to be as, or Slightly faster than a 980, then Price it accordingly, NOT $150 more...it looks like AMD id going to screw up theyre last chance @ a decent summer/fall.

It might be indicative of the costs AMD has to absorb with Fiji/HBM, or it might simply be that there aren't many Fiji chips that can be binned for the voltage the Nano requires (I tend to think it is probably both). If that is the case then it doesn't matter what they charge to a degree, some people will buy it regardless, and pricing it low would just run out stock faster - in which case it is hard to maintain a presence with the card if it is perpetually out of stock.

If it is a manufacturing cost factor then AMD's balance sheet for the next 3-4 quarters is going to look decidedly ugly. Unless DX12 throws them a Hail Mary pass for the ages, debt servicing is going to cornhole AMD. Paring back R&D any further is going to impact what we see (or don't see) in 2017, 2018...

 

[Sony Xperia S]

Everything is connected. Nvidia has the market share, profits and resources to keep pushing intense competition on top of struggling, with always-in-the-red figures AMD.

When AMD is in red, because it seems they will be there no matter what they do, it doesn't matter so much if it is MINUS 150 M $ or MINUS 180 M $.

Instead of blind prices positioning, they can at least try to screw nvidia's party and heavily sponsor cards like the R9 Nano for considerably lower price tags. Give us that damn Nano for 450$ and call it a day. It will hurt nvidia, that's for sure. But no.

Of course, it woun't happen if there is an active cartel between those two.

 

[nem]

 

[EarthDog]

Instead of blind prices positioning, they can at least try to screw nvidia's party and heavily sponsor cards like the R9 Nano for considerably lower price tags. Give us that damn Nano for 450$ and call it a day. It will hurt nvidia, that's for sure. But no.

Of course, it woun't happen if there is an active cartel between those two.

$450 is too cheap for a card of this caliber. Since it is supposed to perform like a Fury, price it like a Fury.

This is wrong on so many counts...

The 980 isn't going to drop to that range, Nvidia has no reason to compete at every price point. And they have shown in the recent past they won't, with Kepler. The 680 only got cheaper once the 770 landed and only because AMD had the solid 7970/280x up against it. If Nvidia wants to compete, they use their cheapo 970. AMD is trying to pull a Nvidia with their Fury cards, thinking they're Titans on water, but nobody cares because of the negative image of the company and lackluster performance below 4K, not to mention the fact that Fury gets crushed after overclocked results versus 980ti. 980ti is both more versatile and less power hungry while having more VRAM and the power to drive it.

390s are not better value thanks to VRAM, because 8GB on that card is useless until you crossfire it. And there is no game that runs over 4GB on plausible resolutions either. It's a non-argument. You're not driving 4k with this, and if so, you need crossfire.
The 970 isn't gimped in a single card setup, there is zero evidence to support that.
The 960 can drop in price just like 660 did, making it an acceptable mid ranger. Remember however that we might still see a 950ti, just like 750ti pushed 660 out of the market. But then again the 950 is good enough already.

The bottom line is, AMD can only compete with their old line up and nobody really wants a Pitcairn these days anymore. So what's left? 390... which is also old news, that is not going to force Nvidia to do anything. And Nano, well I'm sure it looks great but they will sell about 3 of those.

Agree with most of this...

1. That 8GB of vram doesn't get any better using CFx... not sure what you are trying to say there.
2. I can breach 4GB in BF4 with changing the resolution scaling (I run at 2560x1440 which is a 'plausible' resolution). GTA V can also easily breach 4GB at 1080p, I believe The Witcher can as well.

 

[Ruyki]

Instead of blind prices positioning, they can at least try to screw nvidia's party and heavily sponsor cards like the R9 Nano for considerably lower price tags. Give us that damn Nano for 450$ and call it a day. It will hurt nvidia, that's for sure. But no.

Of course, it woun't happen if there is an active cartel between those two.

There's no cartel. AMD is simply following nvidia's pricing because it's best for them.

Fury cards with their interposer and HBM are likely more expensive to produce than their nvidia counterparts so starting a pricing war has the potential to hurt AMD more. And then you also have to consider that AMD is in financial trouble already and simply can't afford to lose even more money.

There's also the issue with Fury supply which seems to be limited but the cards still get sold at the price level AMD set. It would be stupid to change the pricing when it's actually optimal at this point.

 

[RealNeil]

Would love to see how one Crossfire this mini-itx GPU into a mini-ITX mothterboard that only have 1 pciex16 slot....

I used a GTX-690 Dual GPU card.

 

[newtekie1]

GTA V can also easily breach 4GB at 1080p, I believe The Witcher can as well.

The only way you are going to breach 4GB in GTA:V is if you max out MSAA, which basically just renders the game at a higher resolution and then scaled everything down. It is also the most inefficient AA method in use. That being said, even with MSAAx2@1440p I don't breach 4GB...

The Witcher is a totally different beast. The developers just cramp as many textures as possible into the VRAM, even ones that will never be used because they are for areas miles away from the player. So the game doesn't actually suffer if only have 4GB of VRAM, it just doesn't load the furtherest textures.

 

[EarthDog]

MSAA will do that, but, it can be done without pretty easily.

I have never played Witcher, so I don't know what happens when your vram is stuffed... but it can get stuffed.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Sorry, but that CIO lady looks like a 2nd hand female Steve Jobs version. Her talk and her verbal gestures are exactly as Steve's. WTf?!

 

[ZoneDymo]

MSAA will do that, but, it can be done without pretty easily.

I have never played Witcher, so I don't know what happens when your vram is stuffed... but it can get stuffed.

Im running GTA5 on my HD6950 with settings exceeding the vram limit and have never had a texture loading problem, just saying

 

[Sony Xperia S]

There's no cartel. AMD is simply following nvidia's pricing because it's best for them.

Fury cards with their interposer and HBM are likely more expensive to produce than their nvidia counterparts so starting a pricing war has the potential to hurt AMD more. And then you also have to consider that AMD is in financial trouble already and simply can't afford to lose even more money.

There's also the issue with Fury supply which seems to be limited but the cards still get sold at the price level AMD set. It would be stupid to change the pricing when it's actually optimal at this point.

Optimal while all figures show total decline in PC market and decline in discrete graphics sales ? Not to mention AMD's financial losses. You say optimal while being in the red. If someday things change and AMD lowers prices and begins to sell more and turns into green, then wouldn't it be more optimal than now?

Maybe something is not so optimal.

You have no right to say optimal and being in the red at the same time. Both contradict to each other. Unless you intentionally want to be in red.

 

[Ruyki]

Optimal while all figures show total decline in PC market and decline in discrete graphics sales ? Not to mention AMD's financial losses. You say optimal while being in the red. If someday things change and AMD lowers prices and begins to sell more and turns into green, then wouldn't it be more optimal than now?

Maybe something is not so optimal.

You have no right to say optimal and being in the red at the same time. Both contradict to each other. Unless you intentionally want to be in red.

I don't see a contradiction. AMD could be making the most money possible out of the Fury line with the prices they have set. While at this same time this money might not be enough to bring the entire company into the green. AMD is big after all and the Fury line is just one of their many products.

 

[GC_PaNzerFIN]

It all went horribly wrong long before Fury was released. When it was still a bunch of documents, they decided to make a "HALO" product hoping for miracles.
It didn't turn out quite so well, and competitor managed to catch up and even surpass the performance goals set for the "HALO" product we know as Fury series.

What they need is reasonably fast & decent perf/w & affordable card they can sell huge quantities. That is where the big bucks are.
Putting all your eggs in one basket, which you can't produce in volume quantities or cheap was a bad move. I hope they saw this coming as well and moved resources to focus more on next gen cards long before Fury release. That, or they are completely screwed in near future.
You can only fire so many people and decrease R&D costs until you simply put lose the game.

 

[BiggieShady]

Damn, how do they think they'll manage to sell these for $650 when you can buy two 970s for that money? I expect very few people will buy this. Oh well, I suppose the total number of Fiji chips is on the low side anyways.

 

[Yorgos]

Damn, how do they think they'll manage to sell these for $650 when you can buy two 970s for that money? I expect very few people will buy this. Oh well, I suppose the total number of Fiji chips is on the low side anyways.

I like this logic,
don't buy a Ferrari when you can buy 2 cheap Mercedes with the same amount of money.

I bet 2x 3.5 GB 970, considering the Dx12 bench and the win10 issues are the real deal nowadays.

...and if nVidia decides to support a different technology in their bloatware, you'll have your performance floored... just like the 700series fiasco with DC. There are many 780 owners out there(they don't even see their cards in the recent reviews, unlike some 290 and 290x cards.)

 

[Sony Xperia S]

I don't see a contradiction. AMD could be making the most money possible out of the Fury line with the prices they have set. While at this same time this money might not be enough to bring the entire company into the green. AMD is big after all and the Fury line is just one of their many products.

The Fury line is so small part of the production that I guess it has very insignificant footprint on the financial reports.

I guess many other factors are wrong - like expenses inside the company, not very good contracts with GF and TSMC who might be charging a lot, not enough volume of sales which potentially could change something.... etc.
The brand name doesn't help either.

 

[ensabrenoir]

.......I'm still at a loss on how after the mining craze and all those console contracts there is virtually no change financially for Amd. It is a top tier card and deserves a respectable price so i can'y hold earthly blame Amd....... If Nvidia released a Titan mini....it wouldn't be cheap either.......

 

[HumanSmoke]

.......I'm still at a loss on how after the mining craze and all those console contracts there is virtually no change financially for Amd.

Debt servicing.
AMD borrowed heavily (around $2bn) to finance the ATI acquisition. AMD paid $5.4bn in stock and cash, which turned out to be about $3bn too much.
With the debt burdon, and ATI's products not financing it, AMD has had to keep pouring funds meant to keep them competitive into bank loan repayments - which has generally meant that R&D goes hungry, and assets get sold to keep creditors happy.
Less R&D means less end product, and late product - and losing agility in a fast moving market usually means death.
Stripping away assets like their foundry business also meant that AMD was also totally dependent upon others for manufacture and timetable. Paying someone else to fab your chips also introduces their profit margin in the equation. I doubt whether AMD could/would have held on to their foundry business in any case (thanks to bigger fish like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and a higher level of competition from UMC and Chartered Semiconductor) - but at least they could have sold (or spun-off) the business under their own terms rather than being forced into a fire sale (although it did dig them part of the way out of the hole)

It is a top tier card and deserves a respectable price so i can'y hold earthly blame Amd....... If Nvidia released a Titan mini....it wouldn't be cheap either.......

AMD don't enjoy what is known as "Top of the Mind" brand awareness. Some companies have a higher stature with consumers than others - are recognized within their fields as leaders. Some are recognized as followers....and some aren't recognized at all. Intel has it, AMD doesn't - and most of that stems from the late 1960's. Back in the day, consumers didn't buy computers or computer parts. Computers were bought by tech engineers at companies from engineers at semiconductor makers. Intel was founded on IP and engineering (Moore and Noyce mainly, but many others as well - even if a lot of the prior work had been done by the same people at Farirchild. Even Andy Grove has a masters degree in chemical engineering). AMD was founded by two salesmen (Sanders and Turley), one bona fide semicon engineer (Sven-Erik Simonsen), five analog circuit engineers (Gifford, Botte, Stenger, and Stiles), and John Carey (engineering manager). None, except Simonsen, had much stature in the semiconductor business in relation to the staff at Intel. Then of course Intel started advertising and marketing to consumers before anyone else really got a handle on why they should.

 

[Sony Xperia S]

Debt servicing.
AMD borrowed heavily (around $2bn) to finance the ATI acquisition. AMD paid $5.4bn in stock and cash, which turned out to be about $3bn too much.
With the debt burdon, and ATI's products not financing it, AMD has had to keep pouring funds meant to keep them competitive into bank loan repayments - which has generally meant that R&D goes hungry, and assets get sold to keep creditors happy.

These creditors are devils. They always look to take more they had ever given - someone's existence is on the table and they will be happy to kill.

This ATi acquisition turns out to be one of the biggest mistakes in human history.

Not only customers feel its consequences negatively because of lack of real progress in industry as a whole but also AMD will be extremely lucky if they get out of this deep hole in which those devils at ATi and the creditors put them.

What did they think when they forced ATi to sell itself with these 3 B $ overcharge ?
What are the positives of the A10 line? None compared to the cost paid.

We could have been much happier with AMD competitive to Intel, and ATi to nvidia. But no.
From four healthy companies, we are left with two - and the worse of them.

 

[RejZoR]

So, not only it's late, it's late late. I'm surprised people even bother to wait. I know I just got sick of it.

 

[ValenOne]

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/oxide...to-disable-certain-settings-in-the-benchmark/

Oxide Developer on Nvidia's request to turn off certain settings:

“There is no war of words between us and Nvidia. Nvidia made some incorrect statements, and at this point they will not dispute our position if you ask their PR. That is, they are not disputing anything in our blog. I believe the initial confusion was because Nvidia PR was putting pressure on us to disable certain settings in the benchmark, when we refused, I think they took it a little too personally.”

“Personally, I think one could just as easily make the claim that we were biased toward Nvidia as the only ‘vendor’ specific code is for Nvidia where we had to shutdown Async compute. By vendor specific, I mean a case where we look at the Vendor ID and make changes to our rendering path. Curiously, their driver reported this feature was functional but attempting to use it was an unmitigated disaster in terms of performance and conformance so we shut it down on their hardware. As far as I know, Maxwell doesn’t really have Async Compute so I don’t know why their driver was trying to expose that. The only other thing that is different between them is that Nvidia does fall into Tier 2 class binding hardware instead of Tier 3 like AMD which requires a little bit more CPU overhead in D3D12, but I don’t think it ended up being very significant. This isn’t a vendor specific path, as it’s responding to capabilities the driver reports.




NVIDIA is just ticking the box for Async compute without any real practical performance.

 

[64K]

These creditors are devils. They always look to take more they had ever given - someone's existence is on the table and they will be happy to kill.

This ATi acquisition turns out to be one of the biggest mistakes in human history.

Not only customers feel its consequences negatively because of lack of real progress in industry as a whole but also AMD will be extremely lucky if they get out of this deep hole in which those devils at ATi and the creditors put them.

What did they think when they forced ATi to sell itself with these 3 B $ overcharge ?
What are the positives of the A10 line? None compared to the cost paid.

We could have been much happier with AMD competitive to Intel, and ATi to nvidia. But no.
From four healthy companies, we are left with two - and the worse of them.

Why are the creditors devils? Of course they intend to take more they had ever given. You do too with your investments. Even a simple bank savings account gets more than you put in because of interest accrued.

The investors in this major-fail company will lose a lot of money.

 

[Sony Xperia S]

You do too with your investments. Even a simple bank savings account gets more than you put in because of interest accrued.

Sure, if there weren't those two things - negative interest rate and/or inflation.

So, again, you are wrong - I am not putting on the table anyone's survival.

 

[64K]

Sure, if there weren't those two things - negative interest rate and/or inflation.

So, again, you are wrong - I am not putting on the table anyone's survival.

You do know that AMD is not a person that will die if they go out of business don't you?

Maybe the employees of AMD would be better off if they worked for another company that was managed properly. No?