- Joined
- Feb 13, 2012
- Messages
- 522 (0.12/day)
Well technically AMD has always offered competition in price/performance against Nvidia, but my main concern/hope is whether they can do it at a good margin of profit! For example last round AMD pretty much lost against nvidia in the mid-end segment because it was selling much bigger chips at the cost of smaller/cheaper nvidia chips like tonga(r9 380/380x) vs gtx 960. The tonga chip was a decent in size 366mm2 chip while the gtx 960 was a 226mm2 chip, yet they performed on par. Being that nvidia was on a less complex smaller chip their power consumption was less, and by default the circuit design not as complex in general making manufacturing a gtx960 far cheaper than a tonga solution
Same thing happened with gtx980 at around 400mm2 die size vs hawaii(r9 390x) at 440mm2, amd in this case is somewhat more competitive than tonga was because hawaii is a newer revision of gcn so with only 10% extra die space they competed, however the power consumption was far greater on amds side.
With all this being said I would also like to make a suggestion for reviews to focus a bit on this aspect of not only performance/watt and performance/dollar, but also performance/mm2 of die size. Because that in my opinion is a clear indication on who has the superior architecture or the better business model, and basically in other words who can achieve higher performance with better cost efficiency
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The real issue is, AMD blew millions on lots of silicon and transistors, and they were aging on the shelves, so they had to keep them in the market longer and came up with that 3xx refresh after the 2xx refresh. Self fulfilling prophecy for this company. They had to sit it out until 16/14nm because that opens an actual opportunity to make steps to cheaper silicon without a complete architectural overhaul. I mean look at Pascal - it ain't magic. It's just Finfet and another Maxwell.
