AMD’s reputation keeps growing for me. Recently, they became TSMC’s second largest customer, after Apple. Hopefully, they will be able to resolve supply problems faster than their competitors.
AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
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Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
#32Aren't gamers benefitting from better GPUs? Sure right now the supply is not enough for everyone but at some point the high upfront investments will make it harder and harder to manufacture high end GPUs. Who is going to pay for 7nm,5nm and 3nm GPUs? PC gaming is already quite the niche. NVidia makes more money off of data center cards.
I wonder how much cross-pollination there is between the discrete GPU space and AMD's iGPUs.
They're probably selling a dozen Playstation or Xbox APUs for every one 6700XT dGPU. But by building a better dGPU today, they have the technology to make a better APU when it comes to bid out the PS6 and Xbox Series Q, or for the next generation Ryzen "G" APUs.
Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
#33Honest question...why are either AMD(or Nvidia) or retailers not raising their prices until stocks build? It seems like econ 101, prices rise when demand outstrips supply. But that isn't happening at the retail level. Instead scalpers are buying them en masse, and doing the price fixing. Something I've always wondered, but wasn't sure who to ask that would know nuances of doing so.
Multiple reasons. It wouldn't look good on nVidia if they were to raise prices too much. Between being known as a company that doesn't have enough supply/is too popular sounds much better than a company that price gouges their customers.
Gamers are also perceived as being loyal to a given brand, which is always good to ensure a certain level of demand and interest for their future products. If they can't buy a given product, they hardly can be loyal to that particular brand.
Miners are more rational actors, and will pay as much as needed to secure as much supply as they possibly can, as long as they can turn a profit. If the price of cryptocurrency is high, so is the price that miners are willing to pay.
While this sounds good for nvidia, miners will also dump unprofitable cards on the used market, therefore competing against new products from nvidia. If the price of cryptocurrency crashes, as it has done before, then there might be tens of thousands of used GPUs all flooding the market at a certain time. As these would be priced to sell, and the miners have likely turned a profit on the card already, any amount of money that they can get on selling the cards is just pure profit.
Nvidia probably doesn't want to have this sword dangling above their heads. It would be pretty bad for them to announce a new series of GPUs at the same time that the cryptocurrency market crashes, as they'd have to compete against used GPUs at fire sale prices.
Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
#34Aren't gamers benefitting from better GPUs? Sure right now the supply is not enough for everyone but at some point the high upfront investments will make it harder and harder to manufacture high end GPUs. Who is going to pay for 7nm,5nm and 3nm GPUs? PC gaming is already quite the niche. NVidia makes more money off of data center cards.
Nvidia makes majority of their money from consumer GPU sales.
Yes, their compute datacenter cards have been their marketing focus (they call themselves an AI company now) but it is still about 60/40 revenue split in favor of consumer GPU sales.
So your statement "NVidia makes more money off of data center cards." is false.
Source: https://www.investopedia.com/how-nvidia-makes-money-4799532 https://s22.q4cdn.com/364334381/files/doc_downloads/2021/03/...
It is true that in some quarters, their datcenter revenue is more than 50% but that is because many consumers buy around christmas in Q4, and overall consumer GPUs still make up 60% of revenue.
It is not just PC gaming, it is also all the developers of these games, a lot of artists, architects, mechanical engineers who do CAD models etc. etc. They primarily buy the GeForce or Quadro graphics cards. Oh and of course, miners buy these cards too but even when mining declined consumer sales were still >50% of their revenue.
Datacenter sales are usually custom solutions, but they have also been focusing on their DGX boxes. I work at a competitor of Nvidia in the datacenter space, so I know this quite well. They do have 100% of the datacenter market right now (this will change - but that is an opinion) but that does not mean majority of their revenue comes from the datacenter.
Now as far as growth is concerned, that comes primarily from the datacenter. Thats why I guess their marketing focus on being an AI company. But their product is not an AI chip. It is a large vector unit designed for rendering frames and pushing pixels, no matter how much they try to repurpose it (which they have done quite well evidently).
Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
#35Wait, so there are people who are expecting hardware manufacturers to dictate to users what their products can or cannot be used for? Is this the war on general purpose computing I've been hearing about?
Broadly speaking, the issue is that cryptocurrencies drive up demand for GPUs, and that makes them less available/affordable for gamers. If there was a crypto-crippled GPU then it would be exempt from that particular demand.
And since the amount of GPUs won't go up magically by inventing another product there will be too few anyway or the price will go up. There's nothing to win by doing so which is why people condemned Nvidia for doing it.
Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
#36Wait, so there are people who are expecting hardware manufacturers to dictate to users what their products can or cannot be used for? Is this the war on general purpose computing I've been hearing about?
Nvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards
Can you please provide any (semi-)official source for this statement? So if nVidia graphic card makes me money in any way, I'm breaching some license? Of the driver?
Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
#37Aren't gamers benefitting from better GPUs? Sure right now the supply is not enough for everyone but at some point the high upfront investments will make it harder and harder to manufacture high end GPUs. Who is going to pay for 7nm,5nm and 3nm GPUs? PC gaming is already quite the niche. NVidia makes more money off of data center cards.
I wonder how much cross-pollination there is between the discrete GPU space and AMD's iGPUs. They're probably selling a dozen Playstation or Xbox APUs for every one 6700XT dGPU. But by building a better dGPU today, they have the technology to make a better APU when it comes to bid out the PS6 and Xbox Series Q, or for the next generation Ryzen "G" APUs.
"They're probably selling a dozen Playstation or Xbox APUs for every one 6700XT dGPU"
This statement does not make sense today because it doesn't really matter what the demand is. They sell every single one that they produce...you can't buy either the PS5/Xbox nor 6000 cards right now because the supply is wayyyyy lower than the demand.
Also I am sure they share ideas and optimizations but I think overall it is a fairly different architecture. The APUs on the consoles as well as the ones they sell in laptops (or for OEM desktops) are chiplet based, similar to Ryzen. So they probably have smaller dies for GPU, CPU, and IO connected via something like Ryzen's Infinity Fabric (in contrast Intel and Apple put their GPU and CPU on the same die). Their dGPUs currently do not have this architecture although I have heard they want to move to this in the future since it has worked extremely well for ryzen.
Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards
Can you please provide any (semi-)official source for this statement? So if nVidia graphic card makes me money in any way, I'm breaching some license? Of the driver?
https://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/lice...
> No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.
Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards
Can you please provide any (semi-)official source for this statement? So if nVidia graphic card makes me money in any way, I'm breaching some license? Of the driver?
Re: AMD refuses to limit cryptocurrency mining: We will not be blocking any workload
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nvidia already dictates what their consumer products can be used for, and legally restricts you from doing business-like activities without moving up to the enterprise cards
Can you please provide any (semi-)official source for this statement? So if nVidia graphic card makes me money in any way, I'm breaching some license? Of the driver?
They try to restrict you from using consumer cards for HPC computing and have it in their EULA. You can circumvent it a bit, but if you want to buy a hardware compute cluster you _can_ have problems if you want to use consumer grade cards (many hardware vendors that sell clusters kind of ignore this though)
Also nvidia just released (and did something like this before) GPUs specifically for miners. This was seen critical for many reasons for instance the fact that it was done while a "silicon shortage" was/is happening and the inability for users to later use these cards for gaming (note: nvidia fucked up royally and released a driver that can circumvent those restrictions)
Those are just a few examples.