Have AMD given up the mobile market (GPUs)?

So here we are, exactly 5 months past the date when Nvidia launched their 1536 core GTX 780M to the mobile market. This GPU showed +30% increase in performance over the GTX 680M and AMDs 7970M, and despite that AMD have still only the 7970M out on the market. There is one more high end AMD GPU, and that is the 8970M but it is just a renamed 7970M.

Looking up prices`on ebay, one can see that GTX 680M now sells for around $540, the same price as 8970M do. When Nvidia was only out with GTX 680M, there was a huge price difference between the two flagships, maybe even as much as $250+.

Looking at the different notebook OEM brands today: Alienware is Nvidia exclusive on the newest Alienware 14,17 and 18. Asus G-series is exclusively GTX cards. MSI only offer Nvidia cards on the high end GT-series, and as far as I know, Clevo is the only one offering both AMD and Nvidia systems. But since 780M offer much better performance, one might ask if the AMD cards are really selling as much when 680M cost the same and 780M is the card to own.

Then we have the mid/low end laptops with dedicated graphic cards. There you will find a clear majority of laptops offering the GT-series from Nvidia. Nvidia have far more mid end graphic cards to offer on the different laptops, while AMD have the 8870M on maybe one machine. Nvidia have: GT 740M/750M/GTX 760M/770M and GTX 780M on a vast selection of notebooks.

There was a chart posted a year ago where Nvidia showed a great lead in market share with mobile graphic cards from the Kepler series vs the GCN series from AMD.

I`d imagine that the situation is even worse for AMD now, but have no specific data to back it up, other than my assumptions based on the above.

So, what have happend with AMD? Why are there no cards to counter GTX 780M? Why so little GPU selection from them in the market?
Have they given up on us?

 

AMD released a card this year: the 8970M. The 8970M was to compete with the 780M. Companies don't just walk away from a growing market. At best, they take a step back and fix what's broke and then re-enter with something to show, and that's what I think AMD is planning to do next year, starting now with their desktop GPU's.

Better driver support will always give NVIDIA the edge. The way I see it: if NVIDIA releases a GPU that's 20% better than their previous card, AMD needs to come out with something that's 30% better just to compete. Unfortunately, the 8970M was not what it was all hyped up to be, and I hope AMD has learned what it takes to compete for the foreseeable future.

Competition is very important to maintain reasonable prices and prevent monopolies from forming. And because of this, AMD will always exist, until something better replaces them. So, no, they did not give up.

 

The only thing AMD has given up on is the mid-range mobile gpu market.

Seriously, going from a 8870m to a 8970m is like passing 2 full generations of gpus.

 

Pretty sure console and desktop gpu sell more units compare to gaming laptops, so it just a priority thing.

For 1080p,7970m is "good enough", so a better gpu(depending on price) may not be even attractive for most.

 

7970M/8970M is twice as fast as 7870M/8870M, which is the next step down. AMD has literally nothing between their top-of-the-line and middle-of-the-road parts. Meanwhile Nvidia has filled that gap with numerous products: 670MX, 675MX, 650M/750M/755M SLI, 765M, 770M. This huge hole in their mobile product stack is why AMD has so little market penetration in gaming-grade laptop GPU's. Just like with most computer parts, the majority of people don't get the fastest and most expensive stuff and AMD is essentially ceding this huge portion of the market to Nvidia.

 

It has been awfully quiet lately. With all the hullabaloo around the Hawaii-event I was expecting at least some info or leak about their upcoming mobile gpus. I find the lack of info disturbing.

 

7970M still working great at 1080p but I feel its a card that is taking up a lot of the used and 2nd hand market where AMD are not benefiting from it.
They would need new architecture to beat 780M without excessive temperature issues right?

 

I guess not much news since 680m AMD 7970m already reached the sane TDP max since 780m seems to be a monstrosity.

I expect next AMD to be rebadge since the only new cores are the two top tier desktop, rest are rebadges.

I am waiting for 22nm since next gen console games are proving NOT to be next gen. Frostbite 3 is the best Engine in terms of features and complexity for many years to come no doubt and BF4 runs beautifully in current and last year's hardware. I don't expect any other "Next-Gen" games to even come close to FB3 for a few years. If other games like Watchdog are more taxing it will be because devs like UbiSoft are retarded monkeys at optimizing engines.

Sent from my Optimus G using Tapatalk

 

It's why I chose the 675mx over the 680 and 7970 at the time. Wasn't willing to pay $300 (at that time) more for the 680, and there was no way I was taking a risk on AMD drivers on a $1600 machine, even though it was a coin flip on price between the 675 and 7970.

 

There is literally a mile apart from 7970M/8970M/680M and GTX 780M.

Looking at the newest gamebenches from notebookcheck. In 3 games, 680M and 8970M is dangerously closed to the non playable FPS limit, while 780M enjoys a nice boost there.

I don`t understand how AMD could just let Nvidia have the market alone for half a year. Their drivers are working and have been for many months. What they need is new hardware to take up the fight against Nvidia`s flagship.


Batman Origins:
GTX 680M: 54FPS
8970M: 50FPS
GTX 780M: 70FPS

Total War: Rome 2
GTX 680M: 27FPS
8970M: 25FPS
GTX 780M: 34FPS

Splinter Cell: Blacklist
GTX 680M: 31FPS
8970M: 30FPS
GTX 780M: 41FPS

Saints Row 4:
GTX 680M: 42FPS
8970M: Not tested, but probably around 680M
GTX 780M: 52FPS

The Burea: XCOM
GTX 680M: 30FPS
8970M 32FPS
GTX 780M: 35FPS

Gonna be interesting to see Battlefield 4 benches

 

You're exaggerating, the results do not show them to be "a mile apart." Anyway, the AMD card more than makes up for the performance difference with its much lower price. It is a actually a better buy from a price-to-performance standpoint.

 

Not to mention it's superior OpenGL/Compute performance over Nvidia.

 

While I agree AMD is cheaper, I disagree it's a better buy both monetarily and headache wise, simply because that's up to the opinion of the buyer. When I was shopping, the few high end AMD GPU's seemed to come with AMD CPU's, which aren't even a legit consideration to me performance wise compared to Intel. I wanted a high performance machine without Enduro issues, so to me a 780m was the better buy by a mile as not only is the GPU faster, the Intel CPU stomps an AMD CPU.

As always, your mileage may vary and opinions are like a*******.

 

There are quite a few i7 + 7970M/8970M systems out there. The only one with an AMD CPU is the MSI GX60/GX70 which everyone knows is a very unbalanced system.

 

The gap is even closer if you oc/ov since the 780m is electrical and thermal bottlenecked in some machines.

 

There may have been more systems than I was considering, but Clevo users always fuss so hard about Enduro I never considered it, and if you browse the BF4 thread for instance, the biggest performance disappointment so far is for the 7970 users. I'm sure it's driver related, and my last system was an AMD 5870 which I loved, but it gets old after a while. When you are spending the money for a top end GPU, you want it to just work.

 

I have only seen a couple of games that are not playable on the 680m and 7970m/8970m but the 780m makes them playable. Rome 2 was one. I don't remember the other; I had come across it when doing some research while answering another thread.

Point being, it doesn't matter to me if my game plays at 37 fps or 50. Some say they get uncomfortable playing at under 60fps. They can purchase the 780m. For me, unless a GPU makes ALL games across the board get a huge jump, what is the point of paying a huge premium? If you have the money to splurge, by all means. I would for sure have purchased the M18x with SLI 680ms if I had the money to spend at the time. I didn't, so I purchased my current set up and I am pretty impressed by the performance I get in games. I've played several games and never had to overclock. The AMD GPUs are for people like me. And there's quite a few of us. A couple hundred bucks lower and you enter a segment where nVidia has the lead (770m/765m although the 770m is kind of close to the 8970m in some games).

I've noticed that a lot more people ask for help purchasing gaming laptops in the WNBSIB sub-section that lie in the 1500-1700 range and you cannot purchase a 780m with SSD and 3 year warranty extension for that price. Few put >$2000 as their budget.

 

I think that just by looking at each company market preferences this question can be answered rather easily. This past year AMD got the contract from Microsoft/Sony to make the GPU's for the consoles. The consoles GPU's are pretty much desktop GPU's with a bit of tweeks here and there, and for the past year AMD have been developing and perfecting the GPU for the consoles. This current console generation has lasted for so many years, so taking that into account, AMD have been working on tweeking the console GPU's so that they are built to last. They have also in the meantime been working on primarily desktop GPU's and not mobile ones since the console and desktops will be using similar architecture in GPU technology. Since the contract from Microsoft/Sony is such a major deal for them, it is only natural that as a company they will put most of their resources into this and similar projects (desktops).

NVidia on the other hand has jumped on the mobile market big time, not only with notebooks but android devices as well with the Tegra GPU. With AMD pulling out their resources from the mobile market, it is only natural that NVidia has been able to evolve and pretty much dominate the mobile market. However, once these "next-gen" consoles are released, I am sure that AMD will be jumping back into the mobile market, so NVidia will not be alone in this for very long. However, for the android market, NVidia has a major advantage and that is where we may not see AMD push it's products into.

*****EDIT***** If this post makes me sound like a console lover, I am not lol. The last console I bought was a Sony PS2 and I will be staying clear of these "next-gen" consoles

 

These the most selling segment, so Nvidia contracted with OEMs to use exclusively Nvidia graphics with Haswell processors. I'm not really happy because in this mid segment AMD has more efficient GPUs, for example the 87xx and 88xx series and these only available in Samsung laptops. The reason why it is available in Samsungs because they do not have Haswell laptops yet and they probably not in hurry and they enjoying the situation that they are the only company that can sell laptops with Radeon HD 8xxx GPU. Samsung actually do it very smart, Ivy Bridge processors are significantly cheaper than Haswell but offer about the same performance. Than as the only Radeon laptop distributor they can sell out very quickly their machines with high profit margin. These laptops are just going to be more popular with Mantle support, as I heard 18 dice game coming with Mantle and more gaming engine will get the same treatment in the future.

 

If we take into account not only the top end, but 88xx and 87xx as well, the picture is even worse. We are talking about 5 or 6 notebooks with AMD 89xx (MSI, Sager/Clevo), 88xx (2x Samsung) or 87xx (a DELL)! Really?! They've really pushed the focus elsewhere (consoles), but I wasn't expecting it to be this sad.

 

Guys,

The 2nd year after the major new core are always fizzers. This was the case with the 580 and 6990 further revisions of previous new cores and the same is true of 2013 further higher core revisions of 7970m and 680m.
Next year is where it's at for both AMD and Nvidia.
Game on!

 

Kepler overclock far better than GCN. GTX 680M can go extremely high thanks to really good vbios and because it draw little power and does not get hot. GTX 780M beats a GTX 680M by roughly 15-20%. So I wouldnt say the two are close.

What GTX 780M changed is that you need 240W PSU. 180W just doesn`t cut it. Sure it can do some overclocking, but not going high.

I`m using Alienware notebook, and several members have shown that their 1.1GHz 680M have even more temperature headroom thanks to a really good cooling system.

Did you see the recent games tested by notebookcheck?
Batman Origins: GTX 780M have 40% more FPS than 8970M
Total War: Rome 2: GTX 780M 36% more FPS
Splinter Cell: 36% more FPS
Saints Row 4: 24% more FPS
The burea XCOM: 10% more FPS

That is a overclocked 7970M vs a stock GTX 780M. Pretty big difference right there. Anywhere below 60FPS, you be thankful to get these FPS boosts.

GTX 680M cost the same as a 8970M today. Considering it overclock far better, why would anyone buy the AMD alternative?
Thanks to 780M, Nvidia can offer the same performance/price as AMD, as well as offering a superior GPU.


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Please don`t take this as a fanboy rant. I couldn`t really care less about GTX 780M or 8970M since my setup beats both by a good margin while having a vast space of overclocking headroom to beat them further.

I`m just wondering where AMD is and why they don`t care more about the mobile space. I`m sure there are many people who would want a Hawaii 9970M that cost less than GTX 780M and perform better

 

Because you can purchase the 8970m on a system when you configure it. The 680m needs to be purchased off of ebay. You are comparing the price of a used product vs that of a new product. Not everyone wants to install a GPU in their laptop.

Performance/price is not what everyone looks at. Like I said in my post, if the 8970m runs a game at 20 fps, a 40% increase over it is taking it to what? 28 fps? How does that matter? I wouldn't want to play that game on EITHER GPU at under 30fps.

OTOH, if I have a game running at 40fps on the 8970m, a 40% increase takes it to 60fps but for me, I wouldn't mind playing it at 40 fps and paying $300 less. Like I said, the only way you get a 780m in your laptop is if you are willing to shell out over two grand and not many are. A simple scout out of the WNBSIB section on this forum will give you an idea about what gamers are willing to pay.

Also, EVERYONE would like a GPU faster than the 780m that costs less. It doesn't work that way. Given that AMD is pretty far behind nVidia in the mobile GPU section, if they had a chance to make a good profit while keeping a product that is faster than the 780m cheap, they would have done it.

 

Ok, I just checked a random reseller for a random Clevo product.
Clevo P375SM offer both 8970M and GTX 780M. The GTX 780M cost +$200 over 8970M. Seems like GTX 680M have been discontinued from resellers.

Performance wise, take Rome 2 for example. Its 25FPS on 8970M, the limit notebookcheck considers playable. A dip in FPS and you have stuttering. GTX 780M can actually play that game since its at 34FPS and can still do some dips without the player noticing.
Same can be applied to pretty much any game. You can go higher in settings with 780M thanks to a roughly 30% better performance.
If its worth that extra $200, that is up to each and one of us. I can understand that its a luxury many people can`t pay though so I do not disagree with you there. But if you have the money, go for it.

"if they had a chance to make a good profit while keeping a product that is faster than the 780m cheap, they would have done it."
That is the core in the question I`m asking. Financial wise they would have had no problem offering a same performing GPU for the same price or slightly lower. But what is stopping them? Not selling as much as they wanted against Kepler? Not enough notebook OEMs backing them up in the mobile space? That would be a shame but considering the selection of notebooks offering 8970M, I would not be shocked if bad sales were the reason. Or did they reach the max with GCN with the 8970M?

I personally find it strange that Alienware offer no AMD GPUs on their 2013 models.

 

Ok this may seem off topic but does the Samsung laptop with the 8870m even exist anymore? I can't find it.

 

@Cloudfire - Since it's totally worth it why didn't you fancy the 780 SLi? Money, right? I know. You'll probably say that it's unbeatable, but with 780 SLi the chances for microstutering would be even less. Also means more futureproof. The point of the topic was different... Or it wasn't like this in your mind?

 

Money was no issue for me. GTX 770M is a lot more fun playing with. TON of headroom for overclocks and the fans runs really silent because the GPUs produce very little heat. Alienware 18 is extremely quiet btw, really good machine.

770M SLI is about 30% faster than a single GTX 780M. With some overclocks, I can reach almost GTX 780M SLI performance
I wanted to go allin with MX CPU and GTX 780M SLI but decided to wait for Maxwell (GTX 880M) instead. Won`t upgrade, but sell this one and buy a brand new machine of course. After all, around summer next year, we will have: Intel Broadwell, Nvidia Maxwell, SATA Express and perhaps DDR4.
2014 will be a great year.

Cheers

 

Just a heads up to people, Cloudfire has been called out on several different hardware forums for being a - what's a nice and gentlemanly way to put it...

I'll think of something that is less offensive than paid nvidia shill eventually. Anyway he recently served a suspension from the AT forums for this very reason. Something to keep in mind. And before anybody calls me a fanboy, my desktop is rocking 2 EVGA GTX 680s. I just think that pretending to be an objective consumer when you aren't is a little slimey.

 

Nice attempt to shift the discussion toward something personal. I have been on topic the entire thread (except the last one but that was a reply to someone else question) and have backed up my statements with data. If you disagree with something, try to be a little more mature about it than trying to flame. You could, for example post why I`m wrong. But I guess thats something you are uncapable of doing, hence why you are posting these childish off topic posts.

PS: I reported your post for derailing the thread.
PS2: I`m still posting on Anandtech. Not many hours ago I posted there.
PS3: I have been on this forum since 2008. I don`t think anyone here need a headsup about me

 

Cloudfire posts irritating people on the web has become a running joke at this point. We like to keep him around as a case study.

 

I`d like to see the papers when the study is complete.

I guess its several pages now?

 

Nah, we abridged it to one sentence. One word, actually.

Succinctness has its charm.

 

You seem to want to bash AMD in all your posts. I don't see why the majority of posts regarding AMD on this forum that gain more than a couple of pages of responses are started by you despite you not having an AMD part in your system. OTOH, the majority of users who DO have AMD seem to be just fine with it. If you indeed do not start these threads with the intention of trying to bash AMD, then I think it does come off that way, regardless of your intention.

Regarding the following, and I quote

How do you figure? Financially they don't have a problem? How so? Could you tell me what they could do to make a chip better than the 780m? Make a new chip? That's not a financial problem?

I have trouble believing that. A single 770m comes with 960 CUDA cores. Two would have what....1920? A single 780m has 1536 cores. ((1920 - 1536) / 1536) * 100% = 25%. So basically the 770m SLI has 25% more resources than the 780m. How are you able to be MORE than 25% faster (assuming PERFECT SLI scaling) despite having only 25% more compute units? SLI typically scales anywhere between 20-70% in games (the higher the percentage scaling, the lower the number of games that scale to that percentage). So even if you double the clock on those SLI'ed 770ms, you are barely going to be 25% faster (2x clock * 0.5x scaling). Just curious. You can have perfectly binned chips and LN2 cooling and all, but you can't do better than what the hardware physically allows, can you?

 

Alright lets look at some facts then. It doesn't take much in the way of brain power to figure out why the 8970M is the best you can get from them right now.

The 7970M/8970M are based off Pitcairn, a 212mm2 chip. It's small, fast and efficient. So much so that it rocks the socks off Nvidias 214mm2 GK106 (I don't mean to belittle your employer). Where do AMD go from here? The next GPU up is Tahiti. 365mm2, with a 384 bit interface. Two problems. One, Tahiti is big and as a consequence runs warmer and draws more juice. Two, production costs are higher not only because of the jump from 212->365mm2, but the bigger memory interface means you physically need more memory chips on board.

The 7970M has a power draw limit of 84W, and it's pretty unlikely Tahiti could do much better with power limitations like that anyway. Alot of your budget would be moved towards the additional memory on board as well. 20nm will be the next time AMDs next high end mobile GPU is based off different (and faster) silicone.

PS: Tell Jen Hsun I said hi!
PS2: You're lame
PS3: Do you get free graphics cards

 

Actually it is not possible to do > 256 bit memory access with the current MXM standard.

 

Better driver support will always give NVIDIA. The way I see it: if NVIDIA releases a GPU that's 20% better than their previous card, AMD needs to come out with something that's 30% better just to compete. Unfortunately, the 8970M was not what it was all hyped up to be, and I hope AMD has learned what it takes to compete for the foreseeable future.

 

I`m sorry, but did you expect me to write something positive about something negative? I don`t care if someone doesn`t like AMD mentioned in a bad light, but that is the reality.
Kepler was already gaining massive market share from AMD in 2012. Now, one can assume most of it comes from the low to mid end where AMD is literally non exisitent, whereas Nvidia have tons of notebooks with the GT series and the low end GTX series.

That said, I can`t really think that having only a rebrand out, vs a brand new GTX 780M which is much better, won`t help them regain market share either. More like it will make them lose more.
And that should have been more than enough justification for AMD to actually build a new mobile GPU to gain some traction against Nvidia and GTX 780M. Unless, there isn`t much profit to be made in the mobile space for AMD. Various reasons why it may or may not work for AMD. Little OEM support perhaps? Meaning less notebooks with GCN chips, meaning less sales than they would have wanted.

But yeah, there might not be much to create a new mobile GPU from anyway. Hawaii was said to be more efficient than GCN, but it turns out 290X is still the same GCN you find on 7970 anyway, if you look at temperatures and power consumption. Both temps (it runs at 94C btw) and power consumption have increased quite a bit from 7970. So AMD may have to wait for 20nm before making a new mobile GPU. Which is really sad, because that means no competition for Nvidia, and no reduction in price, or any GPUs


As for the GTX 770M SLI vs the GTX 780M. A single GTX 770M is roughly 29% slower than GTX 780M. Various tests, included HTWingNut`s reviews, have shown that SLI scale everything from 40%-80%. Meaning that GTX 770M SLI is on par with GTX 780M in those who scale badly, but is almost 30% faster in those who scale good.
This was some of the reasons why I picked 770M SLI (enormous OC room, evenly distribution of heat between two GPUs/fans instead of having one 780M with 1 fan etc etc), but only a small fraction of the whole decision. Loving this notebook for a lot of reasons.

AMDs drivers certainly have improved though. It is nowhere as bad when 7970M was released and you had everything from Enduro problems, to massive CF problems.
And both Nvidia and AMD have their "own" games where they offer better driver optimizations than the other company.

One thing that would have been quite cool is if AMD introduced the same Crossfire options on mobile as they do on desktops right now.
Earlier they used ribbon cables between the GPUs, now the two GPUs communicate through the PCI-E bus instead. That results in reducing the latency as well as giving better GPU scaling.
Reviews have shown that it indeed offer better performance than the old ways with ribbon cable

 

Seem like both side are pretty dead ended this gen (looking at desktop), until we get new mxm or architecture, performance is more like capped?

 

Here's the NBC numbers. Now, I've seen you do both, cite NBC and discredit them for how much they exaggerate their numbers (depending on whether NBC is showing nVidia or AMD as the winner) so it could be that you would say NBC is crap but anyways (the numbers below depict how much faster in percent the 780m is over the 770m):

Battlefield 4: 50.9%

Batman AO: 48.9%

F1 2013: 10.4%

Fifa 14: 0.3666%

Rome II: 51.3%

Saints Row IV: 44.56%

XCOM Declassified: 44.85%

Splinter Cell Blacklist: 51.29%

DOTA2: 28.52%

Company of Heroes 2: 45.65%

GRID 2: 44.89%

Metro Last Light: 53.55%

BioShock Infinite: 67.85%

StarCraft II HotS: 48%

SimCity: 35.6%

Tomb Raider: 56.6%

Crysis 3: 51.81% (Here the difference is actually over 122% but they use ForceWare 326.45 for the 780m test and don't have equivalent numbers for the 770m so I compared 311.27 for both)

Dead Space 3: 55.05%

Assassin's Creed III: 40.6%

Hitman: 60.95%

And several much older games that have similar numbers.

So unless you are playing Fifa 14 or that other one I haven't heard of (I think it is like a formula 1 simulator or something ), I don't see the roughly 29% slower numbers that you speak of anywhere. They're all pretty clear (except for being rough on the 770m) and are roughly about 50%. THAT number makes more sense considering the 780m has about 60% more hardware dedicated to compute than the 770m. There's my numbers with something to back me up. Your turn.

Negative according to you. No one cares if you don't care about AMD being mentioned in a bad light. Also, it ain't the reality and you ain't the one to lay down the law regarding what is and is not reality, mon ami.

 

Yeah I`m gonna stop right there and will not waste any more energy on you when you dont understand math and the numbers you are posting (you posted how much faster a GTX 780M is. Not how much slower a GTX 770M is).

You clearly are a troll. Might want to check on your numbers before trying to lecture other people. Twice in this thread you have been posting wrong information while being rude. I`m sorry, but I`m too old to play this little game. I have better things to do.

I`m done here. Thanks for derailing the thread with your nonsense.
Have a nice day.

 

Hahaha so says Cloudfire the biggest troll of them all hahahaha too good too good comedy gold man.

 

Comedy gold indeed, but even the best comedies have endings... In any case, locked per OP request.