Re:Why Nvidia Keeps Winning: The Rise of an AI Giant
by paulmd on Friday July 07, 2023 @06:10PM
(#36638939)
It's kinda amazing how year after year reviewers release the "new products are crap, buy the thing we told you was crap last year" and people don't catch on.
The low-end is crawling along due to fixed cost overheads from PHY area that doesn't shrink. 4N is ~3x the price per area as Samsung, and PHY area becomes relatively much larger. The incentive is to cut every cost in PHY area - fewer memory channels to reclaim PHY area and using cache instead, cutting PCIe width to reclaim that PHY area, even cannibalizing the media engine/encoders to claw back that last little bit of space. AMD has actively been engaged in this battle with 6600XT (x8 PCIe) and 6500XT (x4 PCIe, no encoder) and RDNA2 generally shrinking memory bus and replacing it with cache in this same way (and 6600/6600XT and 5700/5700XT also regressed performance vs their predecessors in some situations just like 4060/4060 Ti). On top of that you have big fixed increases in manufacturing, shipping, etc, and the rest of the BOM is ballooning over time too (forget VRAM spot prices, ask automakers if their BOM is higher or lower than 2019... and it's not a small difference, it's probably 2x!)
In this world of organically-low performance increase within the low-end product segment, the impact of clearance sales exceeds the impact of new product generations. And this means we end up in this situation where reviewers do the "the new products suck, buy the ones we told you sucked last year" rubber-chicken routine year after year after year. But if everything is constantly bad, kinda nothing is, really. That's just the nature of the product segment.
And when you look at things like the 3060 Ti being $275 on clearance... the market consensus is that the old products are Good Enough. And the new products in fact may be worse in some ways, unless you are willing to step up in price to maintain the same product segment rather than the same price segment. Because TSMC is cranking the prices 25-50% every generation and Samsung was abnormally cheap to begin with, so there is a definite price step happening.
Hard to see how people don't understand that the $200-300 product segment is dying in the same way the $100-150 product segment already died. 6 months after launch you could buy a 7850 2GB for $150, or a 7750 for $100. What does $100 buy you in the new/retail GPU market these days? Does anybody actually seriously think the inability to deliver new $100-150 GPUs with enthusiast-tier performance is due to "greed" or "agreeing not to compete" as opposed to market realities? But people will defend it to the death that the privilege of making $200 GPUs is some massive profit opportunity that AMD and NVIDIA are just choosing to ignore.
We are in the end of silicon in some ways. Post-Moore's Law the costs have been spiraling, and now we are to the point where consumers are deciding that no, it's not worth the cost increases. And companies aren't going to cut their throats and run zero margin or sell at a loss either. And that eventually flows through to TSMC and ASML, and node research will slow (hyper-NA is already effectively canceled) and silicon research becomes incremental and iterative and slower rather than continuing to make even N7->N5->N3 sized progress. It can get slower.
The low-end is crawling along due to fixed cost overheads from PHY area that doesn't shrink. 4N is ~3x the price per area as Samsung, and PHY area becomes relatively much larger. The incentive is to cut every cost in PHY area - fewer memory channels to reclaim PHY area and using cache instead, cutting PCIe width to reclaim that PHY area, even cannibalizing the media engine/encoders to claw back that last little bit of space. AMD has actively been engaged in this battle with 6600XT (x8 PCIe) and 6500XT (x4 PCIe, no encoder) and RDNA2 generally shrinking memory bus and replacing it with cache in this same way (and 6600/6600XT and 5700/5700XT also regressed performance vs their predecessors in some situations just like 4060/4060 Ti). On top of that you have big fixed increases in manufacturing, shipping, etc, and the rest of the BOM is ballooning over time too (forget VRAM spot prices, ask automakers if their BOM is higher or lower than 2019... and it's not a small difference, it's probably 2x!)
In this world of organically-low performance increase within the low-end product segment, the impact of clearance sales exceeds the impact of new product generations. And this means we end up in this situation where reviewers do the "the new products suck, buy the ones we told you sucked last year" rubber-chicken routine year after year after year. But if everything is constantly bad, kinda nothing is, really. That's just the nature of the product segment.
And when you look at things like the 3060 Ti being $275 on clearance... the market consensus is that the old products are Good Enough. And the new products in fact may be worse in some ways, unless you are willing to step up in price to maintain the same product segment rather than the same price segment. Because TSMC is cranking the prices 25-50% every generation and Samsung was abnormally cheap to begin with, so there is a definite price step happening.
Hard to see how people don't understand that the $200-300 product segment is dying in the same way the $100-150 product segment already died. 6 months after launch you could buy a 7850 2GB for $150, or a 7750 for $100. What does $100 buy you in the new/retail GPU market these days? Does anybody actually seriously think the inability to deliver new $100-150 GPUs with enthusiast-tier performance is due to "greed" or "agreeing not to compete" as opposed to market realities? But people will defend it to the death that the privilege of making $200 GPUs is some massive profit opportunity that AMD and NVIDIA are just choosing to ignore.
We are in the end of silicon in some ways. Post-Moore's Law the costs have been spiraling, and now we are to the point where consumers are deciding that no, it's not worth the cost increases. And companies aren't going to cut their throats and run zero margin or sell at a loss either. And that eventually flows through to TSMC and ASML, and node research will slow (hyper-NA is already effectively canceled) and silicon research becomes incremental and iterative and slower rather than continuing to make even N7->N5->N3 sized progress. It can get slower.