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[EricHiggin]

Pemalite said:

EricHiggin said:

I get what you're saying for the most part, but Lisa isn't running AMD like it was in the past. She doesn't want the company to be seen as second best, as the value option. She wants to be seen as the market leader in terms of performance, she's just using pricing right now to help them get back into the game with their CPU's, and it's working. You can bet if Ryzen didn't take back much market share, that when Zen+ launched, the prices would have gone up more, and even more with Zen 2 now. The only reason the prices have stayed so low is because it's working and they're gaining back market share and mind share.

If the GPU market isn't going to work like that for AMD, which it hasn't, then they might as well sell at higher prices and make as much money as they can that way. Gamers sure want AMD to keep pushing out reasonable price vs performance Radeon cards, but Lisa doesn't want to be seen as that type of brand anymore. She wants to be the next Nvidia as well. After trying your best and constantly being passed up for GeForce, even though your cards are much better bang for your buck, is going to get really tiring and old. How do gamers expect AMD to be able to at least match GeForce and offer cheaper cards, if the money Radeon brings in is just a tiny portion of what GeForce does due to sales and margins? Obviously AMD bet the company on CPU's, and that took away from the Radeon budget big time, and led to the miracle of Ryzen luckily, partially due to Intel being asleep at the wheel. Now they are supposed to do the same with Nvidia even though they are hydrated and focused like an F1 driver?

If AMD is smart, and Nvidia is really that greedy, AMD will use this 5700 pricing against Nvidia. Now that the price of the 2000 series doesn't really have to drop anymore because of the 5700 pricing, even though it should, if Nvidia launches the Super series, and just increases the prices for those cards, it would and should look really bad on them. If AMD is really smart, they will then immediately drop the pricing of the 5700 series by $50 to $100, basically forcing Nvidia to drop the pricing of the regular 2000 series by the same amount. However, Nvidia won't drop the price of their newly launched Super series, and even if gamers don't buy the 5700, they will buy the regular 2000 cards instead, which won't be good news for the brand new Super series sales. This will hurt Nvidia's image as well as stock price, which have both taken hits already over the last year.

For all we know, AMD's ray tracing tech may be much better than Nvidia and will allow them to take over the performance crown, and based on the existing GPU market, AMD could make a killing in terms of profits if this plays out. Just imagine if there is a 5800 and/or 5900 series yet to come. It's also very well possible that AMD may not take the performance crown from Nvidia, but might just go toe to toe again, year after year, in which case they can just remain $50 cheaper at all times. For the low to mid range gamers, they can buy the Intel GPU's supposedly coming out next year.

Intel will come back in terms of CPU's, but based on the past, they don't always come out with newer better tech than the competition. Not to mention that AMD is making seriously good money already, and will just increase that with Zen 2, and likely for another few years anyway. Under Lisa, you can bet they aren't slacking on Ryzen's future, and odds are good that they're already planning beyond that, knowing Intel is no doubt planning a competitive return.

AMD rebranding GPU's every year hasn't helped matters, nor has their insistent reuse of GCN.

AMD had all the opportunities this time around to 1-up nVidia.
They had access to 7nm first, they have access to HBM2 4096-bit... And nVidia didn't have a giant leap in performance due to investing silicon into Ray Tracing...

This year was literally the year AMD could have 1-upped nVidia like they did with Intel. - It could have been another Radeon 9700 Pro or Radeon 4870 moment.

The issue is though... These things take years of planning, we are still feeling the effects of when AMD made Radeon it's own division again, so the decisions set in motion all those years ago is what we are seeing today, you would be surprised how little AMD, Intel or nVidia can react spontaneously due to the competition.

I mean heck, AMD is working on Zen 3, 4 and 5 right at this moment... The decisions made for those chips are the decisions they will stick with for the long term, irrespective of what Intel does, it's a game of long bets.

No that hasn't helped, but Nvidia trying to lock down brands to using only GeForce products, and apparently locking down the 3000 and 4000 naming scheme so Radeon couldn't use it against them like AMD did against Intel, didn't help much either.

Depends on what you consider one upping. If GeForce has higher performing products, but are seen as too expensive, just because they have new tech, useful or not, is that one upping the competition? I'd say it's more greed than anything, and yet they get away with it for the most part. Radeon could have one upped Nvidia with the 5700 series pricing, but what about a couple of months after launch when the Super series drops with higher performance that one up's the 5700?

Planning is a problem yes. More so in terms of tech, and less about pricing, yet that pricing is tied to that tech, especially at the lower margin end. There are things like Lisa saying her and her team were extremely aggressive with Zen 2 in terms of advancements and pricing, so the road map can be sped up or slowed down somewhat. It's not like Intel was on the verge of 6 and 8 core mainstream chips before Ryzen came along, and yet wow did they ever show up fast all of the sudden.