
AMD Reassembles the Radeon Technologies Group - deafcalculus
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12363/amd-reassembles-rtg-hires-new-leadership
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bearjaws
This will be a key year for AMD, if they cannot make a GPU that performs as
well as a 1080ti then Nvidia will clobber them with Volta.

~~~
DCKing
Even if they make a GPU that is competitive with the 1080 Ti it will be much
too late. If NVIDIA stays on top of their game, there's no way AMD can compete
with them with a far smaller R&d budget and mindshare. Furthermore, any AMD
high performance GPU will not be obtainable if the cryptocurrency mining
market stays like it is (and prices need to drop _a lot_ before mining becomes
unprofitable).

AMD will likely never compete with Nvidia again in high performance unless
they outsmart them somehow. Their next architecture, Navi, could be a very
smart idea but I wouldn't bet much on it. It will also not launch before 2019.
Their current Vega architecture does not seem to have what it takes to compete
against Pascal, even with scheduled process improvements.

Let's not forget that AMD is not dependant on having the top end gaming
performance [1]. They can make money with their GPU tech in lots of different
ways and they are in fact doing this quite well. So while we don't have to
worry about AMD's viability as a GPU company, we should expect the market to
become stale from a performance competition perspective. Which is what has
driven the market up to around 2016.

[1]:

In fact their 2013 Radeon R9 290X, their last GPU that was the highest gaming
performance in the market by most measures, performed very poorly because of a
cryptocurrency mining bubble (gamers couldn't buy one at first, and cheap
second hand 290Xes a few months later destroyed AMD's sales) at the time and
simply because the card did not have Nvidia's brand recognition. You have to
wonder whether they even want to compete in this segment if they were even
able to.

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Ajedi32
> Furthermore, any AMD high performance GPU will not be obtainable if the
> cryptocurrency mining market stays like it is

Isn't that a good thing from AMD's perspective? "People can't get our GPUs
because they're sold out everywhere" seems like a nice problem to have.

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gruez
If crytpocurrency prices tank, those mining GPUs will flood the second hand
market, depressing demand for new GPUs. This will be exacerbated by the fact
that they don't have any new/faster products (nothing announced for 2018); why
buy new when you could get 80-100% of the performance for 50% of the price?

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ams6110
Corporate, government, academic enterprise customers don't buy 2nd hand
hardware. They should focus there. Trying to battle in the consumer GPU market
would be much harder IMO.

~~~
gruez
and what do Corporate, government, academic enterprise customers use graphics
cards for? machine learning and 3d rendering (like CAD). that's not a very big
market compared to the (hundreds of?) millions PC gamers out there.

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slivym
Does anything think this goes beyond simple corporate politics? Moving from
vertical to horizontal organisations, re-organised back to verticals, bringing
in a strategy group, moving underperforming execs into 'strategic'
departments?

I can't imagine this really having a palpable effect. Time will tell though.

~~~
dragontamer
Raja, the previous RTG head, left AMD for Intel.

> Does anything think this goes beyond simple corporate politics?

The new RTG leaders changing the organization to better fit their wants, needs
and strategy? I mean, I guess its basically corporate politics because that's
all executive level positions really do.

I doubt that AMD will very strongly change their future strategy. Its clear
that AMD needs strong investments into GPGPU compute and needs to get back
into the supercomputer-level accelerator game to survive in the future.

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Nursie
In the consumer graphics card space it seems like they need some sort of kick
up the arse, organisationally.

The 480 and 580 series were just not very competitive with nVidia for graphics
performance (mining is a different matter, of course) and Vega turned out to
be too low volume and expensive to make much of an impact AFAICT.

Ryzen and EPYC look like a real leap forward for AMD. I hope we see something
awesome and (more importantly) deliverable come out of Radeon soon.

~~~
mizzack
> The 480 and 580 series were just not very competitive with nVidia for
> graphics performance

???

By nearly every account, the 480 was on par with or slightly behind the 1060
6GB at launch, and now the 480/580 is on par with or slightly faster than the
1060.

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Nursie
Mid/low market competitive sure, they had a 1060 competitor at a similar price
point and performance level. But the 480 and 580 are where the range tops out,
they couldn't touch 1070+ performance in that generation at all.

Shortly afterwards the prices started to rocket.

