Will the R600 sink AMD?

Now that it's released its kinda obvious it was prematuraly released to gain money...

Not a 8800 gtx or ultra rival, only a gts... And at $400, amd may be losing money.

What do you think? With AMD in quite a financial disaster, will releasing this only complicate matters? Or help?

Will the $400 price tag help ATI, or will the lack of power hurt it? And are they losing money?

I simpyl want your opinion. I'm not bashing ATI.

Kind of an odd position though. Not as much power as the 8800gtx, but a good price tag.

Will nerds go for price or power?

 

I think it will be ok.

I think the sub 400$ market is alot bigger then the super high end. ATI is in a similar position as the AMD CPUs. They have a good price / performance ratio but cant compete at the very top.

 

Considering only a few percent of the market are willing to spend $500 on a GPU, they're not losing out on much with direct sales of the card (Although each sale of a high-end card has a far bigger profit margin than in the cheaper segments). Mid-range is where it's at, and if they can make a more attractive card there, they may just beat NVidia (in that segment, at least)

Of course, there's the halo effect which currently favors NVidia (if you have thebest high-end card, it will make your mid/lowend derivatives look better as well)

Anyway, it won't sink AMD. Did NVidia die on the Geforce FX cards? You just have to go one year without being able to compete for the fastest card (Although they've gone 6 months already). Next generation is anyone's guess.

 

The problem is, AMD is near sinking as it is.

If the R600 and their next chip don't sell, they are screwed. R600 must sell or they are SOL.

The main problem with it selling though, is that you can get a 8800gts 640 for less and it'll perform better...

 

Well, let's wait for the drivers to get more perfected, also the ATI has 65nm at the moment which means a better position at the notebook market.
And it seems that some companies have their eyes on AMD, so if the R600 doesn't sell well, AMD is more likely to be bought by one of those companies.

 

AMD won't sink, but it is looking increasingly likely that someone with deeper pockets will buy it. AMD (and ATI) have both demonstrated immense technical capability but struggle to get the products to market at the right time and properly finished. Without AMD where would we be with CPUs? Maybe a 2GHz P4?

John

 

Do not forget, AMD is still the world's second largets GPU manufacturer, ahead of nVidia, and the second largets CPU supplier. Believe it or not, it's not the dedicated graphics cards that make most of the profits for ATI, it's the integrated ones.
So, losing out on the high end market will only slightly hurt the company's share price and revenue, not make it go bankrupt.

 

I still don't think AMD is doing that badly. Many of the low end budget notebooks and desktops still use AMD, like many of the systems sold at Bestbuy, etc. A large percentage of the buyers just go in and pick one of those out for budget reasons. As for the 2900XT, its pricetag will essentially ruin the business for the 8800GTS, and potential buyers of the 8800GTX might be tempted to wait for a 2900XTX. In the last generation, the ultra highend ATI card also came out after the NVIDIA one, but was supposedly much more powerful. People will still remember that.

 

Ati has already said they lose money on high end cards usually , so why not go for a better market segment by making a cheaper card. I think we should wait until 2400/2600 is released to pass judgement.

(if it was truly a cheaper card in the first place we'll never know)

 

AMD won't sink. And the world doesn't want them to. If AMD wasn't around to challenge Intel around 5-6 years ago, we'd probably be still stuck with a "Pentium 5" that's using the same NetBurst architechture of the Pentium 4 but running at 6 or 7 Ghz. Talk about lack of inefficiency. Competition excites innovation. Let that be still the case I pray.

AMD will have their time, I'm sure they'll have those days again like when the "cheaper" Athlon thunderbird processor was kicking the asses of the Pentium 3 and 4.

BTW, the X2xxx series of Radeon cards aren't even out. Who the hell ever declared it a fact that the 8800 Ultra is faster than the new top-of-the-line Radeon?

 

The majority of percentage of sales in the graphics market is held by the integrated and lower- mid end segments.. The X2900XT may not be the fastest card on the market but its pretty competitively priced..

But what should be looked upon is the performance of the X2600XT and lower end series and how well they fare against the 8600GS/GT and the upcoming integrated solutions..

Btw, Zellio, why do u say that AMD is losing money over the 400$ price tag of the R600??
Cant we just give all these speculations some rest and wait for market statistics to show whether the card is gonna sell or not?

And moreoever DirectX 10 titles havent even hit the market yet!!

- Just another reader tired of the GPU/DirectX 10 wars and the speculations that have been going on over a year..

 

The problem is, AMD is near sinking as it is.

If the R600 and their next chip don't sell, they are screwed. R600 must sell or they are SOL.
[/quote]
How do you know? They're losing money, yes, but that doesn't mean they're about to go under. Corporations have this ability to acquire lots and lots of money when they need to, so I'd expect them to be able to last a couple of years before they get into serious financial problems.
Unless you have information to the contrary?

Lack of inefficiency?
Interesting double negative...
Anyway, a 7GHz NetBurst CPU wouldn't be bad at all. The problem is that they couldn't reliably get it up over 4GHz.
*If* it had scaled to 7GHz, it would be a pretty decent CPU, and probably more or less competetive with today's CPU's.

They were losing money then as well. They can't survive in the long term just by being cheaper. The best it can do is keep them alive until they have a competetive product.

Reviewers. The cards have been sent to reviewers for testing, so....

 

7 Ghz = Too hot. Waste of energy. I'd rather stick to a better instruction per clock ratio of the recent Pentium Ms, Athlons, Core Duo / Core 2 Duos than the raw clock speed with a long pipeline architecture used by the Netburst Pentium 4s. How can that be a double negative?

And are the one's used by the reviewers the final product?

BTW, is there like an introduction thread here? I'm new here. Actually, I'm a new laptop owner. It's my first time having a laptop so I decided to join this forum. Anyway, I'd just like to say hello to everyone.

 

No, and it's because we don't know what will happen yet. AMD doesn't just sell R600s, they got other product lines and licensing contracts that keep the company with cash flow. And if I were to take a page from the "console wars", it seems cheaper price tags get more attention from consumers. Not that I am saying Nvidia is going to lose market because its 8800s are more expensive.

 

Untrue. Even an 8800GTS 640 MB version will beat the Radeon HD 2900XT in benchmarks. The X2XXX series of Radeon cards ARE out.

 

Any proof to your claims?

 

I am hoping that newer drivers will bring up the performance of R600. The architecture was already very driver sensitive since the R520 because of the programmable memory controller and we saw this when ATI put themselves back in the OpenGL game overnight with a driver update. What's more, the R600 is actually similar to the GeForceFX in that it uses VLIW. Highly optimized drivers and compilers are needed to extract performance out of VLIW so hopefully they have progressed since nVidia's attempt with the GeForceFX.

What I don't understand is that ATI once again intentionally crippled their GPU by not providing sufficient TMUs. They claim the future is more shaders and less textures, but frankly if that future is still likely 2 years away by which time these chips will be underpowered anyways. Like the R580 had 48 PS which is massive, but the major bottleneck was only having 16 TMUs compared to the G72's 24. I bet if ATI went with a 2:1 PS to TMU ratio isntead of 3:1 and had 40 PS and 20 TMUs, the R580 would have decidedly outperformed the G72 without having a large die space increase. Once again, the R600 has a vary decent amount of 64 unified shaders (calling them 320 stream processors isn't really accurate), but they still only have 16 TMUs compared to the G80's 32 TMUs. Even if shaders are the future the gross disproportion for poor texturing capability is still a performance limiter and I don't understand why ATI doesn't seem to correct it.

 

I think we would really see the result after ATI gives out a better driver.

 

A quick google search will provide you with all the answers you need.

Here's one from vr-zone.com:

For $100 less, I'll take the 8800GTS 640 MB version over the Radeon X2900XT any day. New drivers from ATI and Nvidia are due in several weeks, we'll see then how the two cards compare. For now, the 8800 series is still on top.

 

Says who? What you mean is that the P4 ran hot. Yes, it did.
But the situation we were discussing was a P4 that ran at 7GHz. For it to manage that, Intel would have had to solve the heat problems. And if they did that, it would obviously not be too hot.
As long as it has the heat problems it does, it won't get over 4GHz. So in a hypothetical situation where it'd be at 7GHz now, it'd be safe to assume that it didn't run all that hot. All I was trying to point out was that a 7GHz P4 would actually be a pretty decent performer.

Also, you're making a big mistake in assuming that deeply pipelined architectures like NetBurst are inherently bad, hot or inefficient. Any extreme is inefficient. Going 100% for multicore and wider CPU's is inefficient too, and in the end, you'll run into the same problems with heat and with diminishing returns on performance. But it is certainly possible to make fast P4-style architectures. Just like it's possible to make flawed, overheating, inefficient Core 2-style ones.

"Lack of inefficiency" certainly can... Read what you said...

Yep.

Hi

You could put a "hi, I'm new" thread in the off topic forum if you want to, but most people don't...

 

But if they would make P4 energy efficient I don't think it could be called P4
The radical design of P4 caused many problems.

 

Hmm... seems like we have a different interpretation of how the heat problems of the 7 Ghz CPU similar to a P4 will be solved. I was thinking of new, radical mammoth cooling systems that became a standard for those 7 Ghz CPUs. On the other hand, you thought those problems would have been solved in a hypothetical situation like that.

Regarding the R600. Seems like I haven't been well informed recently. The R600's drivers are crap. Even a X1950 XTX is faster. The performance of the R600 is blows away the G80 series, but it currently seems like real-world performance is crippled by the crappy drivers. And it sounds kinda inefficient too. It runs way hotter and consumes a lot more power than the X1950s and 8800s. We'll just have to wait for the newer drivers to come and see the 8800s be dethroned. Yet again, everyone but the enthusiasts will consider the HD 2900 XT inefficient due to a required massive PSU and cooling systems.

 

The highend parts are for prestige, they really need to sell the HD2600 and lower in decent quantities, then they will be doing better.

Adding more stages to simplfy each step and rack up the frequency is hardly radical, its stupid and inefficiant, sure it worked for awile but after 3.8ghz it fell to pieces.