Intel Arc Graphics A380: Compelling For Open-Source Enthusiasts & Developers At ~$139

[coder]

Don't look at the past, look at the present and the near future.

Well, your original misstatement was about the past, but okay. Let's look at the present and near future...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17505...-tools-is-hard

their Data Center and AI Group took a huge hit and will further suffer during the next two years at least.

This isn't fab-related. You're trying to change the subject, in hopes that we'll forget your initial assertion was such a load of ignorant BS.

No, Cooper Lake is the perfect example as it had to be fabbed on a technically obsolete process ...

Cooper Lake was basically just a special version of Cascade Lake that they made for customers who couldn't wait for Ice Lake SP. Efficiency-wise, it's no worse than Cascade Lake, either (which is not to say it's any good, BTW). The entire point is a digression.

Dude, you really seem to like fighting strawman arguments. I never made such a claim,

What you did say was:

"Agreed, the last thing consumers want is a duopoly dictating prices and milking the market as we have seen during the last two years. I don't get all the whining from the companies about higher costs either, it's their job to drive costs down with their partners."

Thinking Intel being in the GPU market would've significantly changed the situation involves some combination of naivety and magical thinking.

It is of no relevance of what Nvidia wanted to or not for my point that they did not fight for the same wafer capacity with AMD at TSMC.

How do you know that? They in fact did buy TSMC 7 nm wafers, but used them for their datacenter products. If they could've gotten more capacity, at a competitive price, they certainly would've used it for their consumer GPUs, as well.

I also dispute the notion that Nvidia didn't want to fab Ampere at Samsung, it was a deliberate gamble on their part as they were not happy with TSMC's pricing

Just imagine what effect Intel buying up TSMC 7 nm wafers would've had on pricing and availability! You complain that AMD didn't produce more RX 5000-series, but if they had to compete with Intel for TSMC 7 nm wafers, costs and/or quantity for AMD would've suffered even more, certainly not helping them ramp up 7 nm GPU production.

a new market entrant that is happy with lower margins and does not compete on the same process node for wafers surely would have had an impact on overall pricing levels as that would drive demand away from their competitors.

What's wrong is your premise that they could've had a meaningful impact without competing for production capacity with AMD and Nvidia.

Even ignoring the bulk of "the last two years" and focusing just on the beginning of this year, N6 ramped too late to have a significant effect, before crypto prices started falling, earlier this year. AMD's N6 products were a tiny GPU (106 mm²) and a higher-margin mobile part (208 mm²). The A380's die is 157 mm². If they had made for launch at or before AMD's launch of the RX 6500XT, then it seems unlikely it'd have been any cheaper than that product.

And even if it was cheaper, your premise that the simple availability of low-end products would've shifted the market lower -- AMD's RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 were that, and did have good availability for most of the time since their launch. And they didn't shift the GPU price distribution, it took the onset of a recession and crypto crash to do that!

I think your argument is ignorant of the relevant details and basic understanding of economics and therefore of no substance.

The problem here is exactly your basic understand of economics. It's like "school child" basic. You seem to think TSMC can just wave a magic wand and conjure up more wafers that it didn't occur to them to wave before. Or that they'll cut Intel some kind of special deal, because Intel is such a special company. Or that Intel bidding for the same wafers everyone else wants won't push up prices and reduce supply for everyone else.

TSMC is the bottleneck. You just can't seem to get your head around that.

Read my last paragraph of this post again, they are paying for different nodes - your fixation of your flawed "fixed wafer volume for all" thinking is really making you look stupid.

You keep trying to shift the argument, because you know your original position is utterly indefensible. And I'm somehow the stupid one.

Go ahead and type some more long posts. It's not going to make your initial statement any less ignorant and wrong. And the longer this goes on, the worse you'll end up looking. The only thing more pathetic than a fool is a stubborn one.

the acceptance of lower margins has also positive effects for consumers

Except Navi 24 is staring you in the face, asking for an explanation of why it didn't move the GPU market. Its price/performance ratio is at least comparable, if not better than the A380's.

It's also great to see you back paddeling

That's not me backpedaling, that's you shifting your argument, frantically trying to find a position you can defend.

A good tip for any future argument, try to comprehend what others are saying first

Pro tip: don't opine about things you don't know anything about. And if you do, and somebody calls you on your shit, just walk away. Trying to defend such ignorance just draws attention to it and makes you seem all the more foolish.

Furthermore, get your basic facts right next time before starting to lecture people.

Pfft. Again, I'm struck by the irony of you telling me that. Just another example of Dunning-Kruger, I suppose.

[ms178]

Thinking Intel being in the GPU market would've significantly changed the situation involves some combination of naivety and magical thinking. [...] TSMC is the bottleneck. You just can't seem to get your head around that.

Accusing me of naivety and magical thinking but denying any impact of Intel on the GPU market? That's something I cannot grasp, indeed. I think we both made our disagreement clear on that point. To explain my former statement, the first part was a complaint of getting milked by both AMD and Nvidia since 2020. Sure there were some cost increases, but the high demand fueled the greed of everyone who profits from this, from the distributors and re-sellers hoarding cards or Nvidia selling directly to miners (allocating that wafer capacity for them while their PR stunts made it look like that they cared for gamers, haha). Also as long as their goods were in high demand, there was no (short-term) incentive for AMD/Nvidia to ease the supply constraints as they could simply mark up their prices instead, but we see the long-term consequences now with their high inventory levels, a new GPU generation and a new market entrant knocking at the door plus fading demand from crypto currency mining. Maybe you didn't hear the whining from Nvidia about the prospect of lower margins during their last earnings call, as I see it in Eurpe, these cards are still not around the MSRP at the end of their shelf live but keep complaining about high inventories and lower margins. Maybe they should have lowered prices to get rid of that inventory sooner? There are only so much people around willing to spend over 500 USD/EUR for a decent mid-range card or higher. Lower that barrier, and you get more customers, yes - it is actually that simple.

Just imagine what effect Intel buying up TSMC 7 nm wafers would've had on pricing and availability! You complain that AMD didn't produce more RX 5000-series, but if they had to compete with Intel for TSMC 7 nm wafers, costs and/or quantity for AMD would've suffered even more, certainly not helping them ramp up 7 nm GPU production. What's wrong is your premise that they could've had a meaningful impact without competing for production capacity with AMD and Nvidia.

Please don't mix these two seperate points I made together in one soup. I made a clear distinction about the two that also cover different time spans. The first point was a complaint that AMD was not more aggressive with the 5700XT, the chips were most likely produced in the March - June 2019 time frame for a launch in July 2019. They could have ordered more wafers or used more wafers for GPUs of the ones they had available. Maybe they could not get more from TSMC, but they prioritized EPYC/ZEN - with a negative long-term effect in the GPU market as they were absent in the high-end at that time and volume in the mid-range was too low to make an impact. I get it that there were tough choices to be made here and that the bean counters prevailed, as you cannot quantify the lost mind share in the GPU market in $$$. They postponed their fight for GPU market share into the future, but with Intel as a new contender in that market, that fight will only get harder, not easier (assuming Intel will stick to Arc and improve upon each iteration). Intel's GPUs were nowhere on the horizon at that point in time so there was no competition at all for wafer allocation with them for GPUs at TSMC, hence I don't get your argument here. Sure, there were a lot of other TSMC customers waiting in line for 7nm capacity, however the amount Intel bought for their FPGA business are not meaningful at all in the overall picture. But with a more clever strategy AMD could have had a more diverse range of options, fabbing some low-end chips or the APUs for the consoles at Samsung (which is cooperating with AMD on RDNA in mobile for some time, hence I bet that RDNA is already running on Samsung's processes for some time now, however they chose not to go that route). As soon as they ended their relationship with Glofo and entered a deep partnership with TSMC, a lot of people started to question if TSMC could meet all the 7nm supply AMD needed, it turned out that they could not and AMD lost a lot of business due to that strategic decision.

Even ignoring the bulk of "the last two years" and focusing just on the beginning of this year, N6 ramped too late to have a significant effect, before crypto prices started falling, earlier this year. AMD's N6 products were a tiny GPU (106 mm²) and a higher-margin mobile part (208 mm²). The A380's die is 157 mm². If they had made for launch at or before AMD's launch of the RX 6500XT, then it seems unlikely it'd have been any cheaper than that product.

You might have missed the memo that N6 was supposed to be at output parity with N7 at the end of 2021, which would have fit perfectly for an Arc launch for a Q4/21 date where prices were still sky high - https://www.anandtech.com/show/16732...cturing-update - as there were no problems reported on yield or anything, I assume that projection to have come true. Hence I don't see a fab capacity issue at all for that particular time frame that you are claiming.

And even if it was cheaper, your premise that the simple availability of low-end products would've shifted the market lower -- AMD's RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 were that, and did have good availability for most of the time since their launch. And they didn't shift the GPU price distribution, it took the onset of a recession and crypto crash to do that! [...] Except Navi 24 is staring you in the face, asking for an explanation of why it didn't move the GPU market. Its price/performance ratio is at least comparable, if not better than the A380's.

If you followed the market reports, it was reported that consumer demand started to fade away in Q1 of this year somewhat, accelerating in Q2. Have a look at the pricing levels of the last two years in Germany, you will see the peak in December 2021 and steep decline from then on. This was even before crypto crashed hard. And while the Navi 24 cards eased the pressure for low-end buyers somewhat, I don't need to tell you that their reception in the press was less than enthusiastic, for reasons talked about in the reviews. But OEMs now had an option which was simply not available to them before, hence at least some OEM demand could be satisfied from that point on. In the DIY market however, only people desperate enough for such a card would have bought these at that time though. But still, the demand shifted away from the high-end models as there are only so much people willing to spend 600 USD+ for a toy and now had a (crappy) option to spend less to get by for a year or two. But people also had the option to look at the used market (which also had inflated prices), the option to simply wait longer with what they already owned or to exit the market alltogether. I guess most were using these other alternatives instead of buying a somewhat crappy product for still too much money. More competition from Intel would have helped to keep AMD's prices in check at that time but the lukewarm reception in the press did its trick even without them in the market to lower their price.

Pro tip: don't opine about things you don't know anything about. And if you do, and somebody calls you on your shit, just walk away.

I am following the CPU/GPU market for 25+ years and do my digging into the details as a hobby. I am by no means a professional market obsever, but as I have also worked in IT for some time, I am not the ordinary uninformed forum troll either. I also get it that opinions can vary, but ignorance of facts and the twisting of arguments to your liking are certainly not part of a discussion worth having. I am all for an intellectually pleasing debate with you in the future, and ours showed at least some signs of it. But please, keep it civil from the start next time.

[DanaG]

Now, I'd love to see how one of these works on aarch64, with the SolidRun Honeycomb LX2K board.

[qarium]

As usual, just some notes:

• It is statistically invalid to extend the experience of just 2 people (you and your brother) to the whole population
• "I am on wellfare 449€ this 10% inflations hits me hard" - It (for example) depends on the latency (months) with which EU governments raise the state-funded parts of pensions for people above approximately 65 years of age. So far, in my country, the government's response to higher prices of food and energy has been satisfactory, which means that the truthfulness of your claim that "The 10% inflation hits most hard the poorest" is quite limited, at least where I live.
  • Besides that, you should be aware of the fact that the statement "FOO hits most hard the poorest" is a tautological statement that is true irrespective of what FOO actually is.
• The truthfulness of your implied claim that "A person earning 449 €/month cannot once per year afford to buy a 130€ GPU" is questionable.
• "... buys the most expensive organic meat and the best food he can find" - It is a false statement that healthy food is expensive.
  • It is more likely to be the true that, if food A and food B have a similar nutritional value and acceptable taste and price(A) > price(B) then your brother will choose food A instead of food B just because he can and not because he has computed that choosing A is the optimal choice.
• I don't understand why your brother is surprised that he paid more for food in the supermarket. Isn't he (and you likewise) watching/tracking how, and why, food prices change over time? I am not so surprised what I pay for food in the supermarket.
  • By the way, I wasn't surprised when Russia's troops crossed Ukraine's borders on 2022-02-24. I was actually thinking that Russia might start such an operation/war.
    • People, who were surprised by Russia's act, are for example those who believed that if Russia is accumulating troops at Ukraine's borders then it doesn't mean anything and those troops are present at the borders just by accident.

man logic is strong with you. (i write this without irony)

something what is true statistically invalid can still be an example to express something i did want to tell you.

"at least where I live"

tell me where do you live ?... because here in germany the wellfare money is set to a point where no person can afford their daily needs. people who calulated this come to something like 680€ but we get 449€ means you have deficit every month.
on other countries this is different i know.

"The truthfulness of your implied claim that "A person earning 449 €/month cannot once per year afford to buy a 130€ GPU" is questionable."

if you have a plus after you did buy all your needs and absolut needs then yes then you can buy this 130€ card if you spare the money the complete year.

but all people i know who are on wellfare here in germany they have zero plus and more likly a minus every month

they do not accumulate money they accumulate credit-card bills means every month they go more in minus.

and this people can not buy a 130€ in a year because they are poorer at the end of the year than at the start of the year. and even after 10 years after ten years they have even more credit card fee and are even more in minus.

"buys the most expensive organic meat and the best food he can find" - [I]It is a false statement that healthy food is expensive."

i mean it this way: the most healthy food non- organic let it be cheap healthy non-organic food in germany as soon as you buy the same food with organic brand you pay more. even if there is no cheaper option. your thought is a with the thought of a hypothetical cheaper non-organic healthy option food.

"It is a false statement that healthy food is expensiv"

this is mayby true but on the other side if you choose the cheapest most healthy food and then buy it organic you pay more than the non-organic option.

"I don't understand why your brother is surprised that he paid more for food in the supermarket. Isn't he (and you likewise) watching/tracking how, and why, food prices change over time? I am not so surprised what I pay for food in the supermarket."

i tell you something about my brother under normal circumstances he does not go buy food.
and also he did not read a book in 20 years plus...
my brother also does not actively follow news or lets say only very limited amount what he gets some on his smartphone he maybe reads in his rare spare time.
my brother is surprised because of he goes shopping for himself in like 10 years he has no clue what the actual market prices are.
and also it does not care at all he spend 400€ instead of 200€ he has 30 000€ he does not care at all.

you are really strong at logic... just a question do you have time and the will to teach me a more advanced logic ?