This is fundamentally the appeal of consoles, they are affordable because the platform holders cut out resources in an effort to find the right balance between performance, size, noise/heat and cost. The additional time to market versus PS4 Pro suggest to me anyway more under the hood otherwise why wait but frankly I'm not sure how that power is going to end up being used... Most consumers have 1080P TVs with more and more migrating to 4k everyday and developers seem to be responding a bit more to consumer's desire for 60 fps so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]
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This is fundamentally the appeal of consoles, they are affordable because the platform holders cut out resources in an effort to find the right balance between performance, size, noise/heat and cost. The additional time to market versus PS4 Pro suggest to me anyway more under the hood otherwise why wait but frankly I'm not sure how that power is going to end up being used... Most consumers have 1080P TVs with more and more migrating to 4k everyday and developers seem to be responding a bit more to consumer's desire for 60 fps so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
There's no reason why the game concept I floated would have to be multiplayer in any way. It could be, and that could also be interesting if done well, but a single-player experience would be just as enhanced by a world full of independent AI agents acting on and reacting to the world around them and not having the fidelity of that simulation limited by the resources of the local system. In turn, the local console can be totally focused on delivering maximum detail in the limited window on the world that the player can perceive at any given time.
Because it's already done! A solution exists already and is in a released product.
Right of course. That's probably is the only assumption the debate teeter totters on. If it's a minor difference between the two chips and it somehow is engineered to meet that price point and it's available, then why not. If you pose the question to 'me', lol, yea of course, you're not talking a huge difference in cost to me. But i don't know how things work up there, I've never had the privilege of designing hardware or looking into costs for consoles.
I guess this comes down to what each reader believes Zen will land in terms of pricing. I think it will be high, AMD is missing high margin products, Zen is supposed to be a high margin product, Lisa describes it as one. Selling it for very low margins in the console space would to a degree undermine their PC/Serve side of the business. At least that's the way I see it.
Like Ferrari selling Ferrari's at cost to Ford to rebrand and sell for a quarter the price.
I thought Ryzen and the upcoming server product was high margin and based on Zen technology but that's not to say all Zen offerings will be high margin?. She also noted specifically the console semi custom area was low margin.
AMD is not Intel. AMD does not have the luxury to force prices on the market depending on their own price expectations. They will take whatever they can get in money and sell everything they have. There is nothing for them to win in not offering Zen for consoles and expect this would result in higher prices in the PC market.
you think zen wouldn't be faster clock for clock than jaguar ? I doubt it as they designed zen to scale both ways.
It also depends on what the thermal load is of the xbox scorpio.
According to Anand the original xbox 360s used up to 180w in gaming (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3774/welcome-to-valhalla-inside-the-new-250gb-xbox-360-slim/3)
So its obvious they can put a lot of thermal load into a console esp with better designs than the original xbox 360 and its tiny little exhaust fans.
Does it matter to AMD as long as they get the money ? If MS is willing to pay more to AMD for zen than jaguar than that is profit they wouldn't otherwise make. As far as I'm aware MS pays a liscesing fee and then has it produced at the foundry of their choosing. So I don't see it taking zen chips away from AMD to sell to servers and enthusiasts anymore than a jaguar chip would by simply taking up fab time.
Is that not exactly what an improvement in IPC means, better throughput at equivalent clock speeds.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I think Ferrari would be a bad example here. AMD would be more similar to a lower tier car maker. And those actually do resell their vehicles to other auto makers to rebadge/reskin and sell under their brands. Mazda and Ford have done that. Toyota with Chevrolet. Isuzu with Dodge/Crysler. Mitsubishi with Dodge/Chrysler. Mazda with Alfa Romeo, etc. In many cases the rebadged vehicles are sold cheaper than the original vehicle, granted not 75% cheaper.
Toyota and Subaru have done it as well and they are in the same market.Regards,
SB
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I think Ferrari would be a bad example here. AMD would be more similar to a lower tier car maker. And those actually do resell their vehicles to other auto makers to rebadge/reskin and sell under their brands. Mazda and Ford have done that. Toyota with Chevrolet. Isuzu with Dodge/Crysler. Mitsubishi with Dodge/Chrysler. Mazda with Alfa Romeo, etc. In many cases the rebadged vehicles are sold cheaper than the original vehicle, granted not 75% cheaper.
Regards,
SB
But Ford aren't going to sell GTs to Mazda to be their new Mazdaspeed 6, which is more what Shifty was getting at.
We're at a bit of an impasse on this debate because I clearly can't answer that question without inside knowledge of dealings. I will say that it is _very_ rare that a new technology or feature is released and it comes out at rock bottom prices.
That being said, Margins matter. Margins matter _a lot_.
When you sell really low margins and high volume it does take away from your other products and channels. Walmart did this to Vlasic, sold their gallon pickles for < $3. All of Vlasics other channels got murderred and they didn't have enough pickles to make higher revenue products like relish and such.
So yes, margins will always matter. Margins matter because people will always go to the cheapest item available, and Fab time matters because higher margins products can be made instead of making low margin products.
Ryzen symbolizes significant investment in their CPU business, I'm not convinced they'll just give it away. They're going to get as much as they can for this product.
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Sure, I wasn't going for accuracy. Just suggesting AMD may want to keep a premium brand if they've a chance of creating one. Think of it more like Ford unveiling a new Ferrari rival supersports car, and providing 90% the same experience in a cheap sports car for 10th the price that just sticks a new body over the same chassis and engine. They'd completely devalue the premium car doing that. Keeping it rare keeps the price high.I think Ferrari would be a bad example here. AMD would be more similar to a lower tier car maker. And those actually do resell their vehicles to other auto makers to rebadge/reskin and sell under their brands. Mazda and Ford have done that. Toyota with Chevrolet. Isuzu with Dodge/Crysler. Mitsubishi with Dodge/Chrysler. Mazda with Alfa Romeo, etc. In many cases the rebadged vehicles are sold cheaper than the original vehicle, granted not 75% cheaper.
Of course, that all assumes availability. Even if AMD provided cheap Zen based consoles and expensive Zen based supercomputers, it's no like potential high-end customers will buy the consoles instead. But in terms of brand, they may want to keep Zen something special. I don't actually think that's the case though given other evidence.
I do wonder sometimes about the merits of a console that can deliver better results early on, and lower the technical hurdles that might prevent innovative, riskier or lower budget games from shining. I'm mindful of the likes of some cool, creative Unity titles that run like shit on consoles but fly on PC's with relatively weak GPUs.
No doubt the future is about shifting more and more renderer work to the GPU, but often the future takes too long to arrive (especially for developers on a budget!). In the mean time I want all kinds of games to run well, and especially at high, stable frame rates.
Unfortunately (for me I guess!), history shows that putting your money into the graphics setup delivers bigger results for the vendor, so I wouldn't actually blame MS if they simply smashed the glass at a museum, grabbed themselves some Jaguar, and ran off loling.
lol well.
It would appear that AAA no longer has the major returns it once did.
One could look to Minecraft, Hearthstone, and all sorts of smaller titles that just have this massive ROI ratio. It makes for an interesting discussion about games and where we should/need to be headed. The cinematic experience is certainly hype inducing, but also the most costly.
apart from the fact we know that's not the case here.
they have already said they want it in basically everything, not just high end.
if anything it's like when they got gcn into consoles, they used it as strong pr.
Never heard them mention jaguar though, if it's zen based I bet they'll be talking about it like gcn
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low end zen?
http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-4-core-cpus-take-intels-i3s/
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I don't understand. A pickle is a pickle . There are finite pickles and thus if Walmart makes cheap pickles it will hurt other companies because 1) Walmart can use other profits from other items to sustain the cheap pickle and 2) there are a finite amount of pickles and if Walmart is the only one moving pickles they will be the oens buying the most getting the best deals. 3) its will affect pickles and things made of pickles.... but what about things made with fake pickles (pickle taste made in a lab ? )
With AMD their fabs are making chips. What difference does it make if they are jaguar or zen ? Any time a scorpio APU is made its one less zen chip that can get made and sold either way ? If Zen is sold in an xbox its not going to stop someone buying a zen for a server . Xbox's aren't used in servers. So your last point doesn't really make sense.
ahh, right, I didn't write that out clearly. The story is that Vlasic is the pickle manufacturer. They sell pickles, relishes etc. Walmart was their largest channel.
Walmart bought gallon pickles from them for 2.95/2.96 if I recall correctly, marked it up 1cent, and sold it at 2.97. It was their way of letting the world know that they were the cheapest place to buy anything.
Demand was high for the pickles, people kept buying them even if they didn't need them. Eventually eating into sales of Vlasics other channels (grocery stores, who bought the pickles at higher prices) and it erodes their higher margin products like relish (because all the pickles were being sold to Walmart and not being used to make relish). They tried to stop Walmart selling their pickles at cost, but they just said that if they didn't, they would find another manufacturer that would. And Walmart was their largest channel, making up over 30% of their revenue alone.
So AMD is Vlasic. And MS and Sony are Walmart. They represent high volume but very low margin. If your fabs are all spun up working low margin products, they can never be used to make high margin products. This might be okay for businesses that are designed around that. But it's _not_ okay for technology companies that have _deep_ J curve graphs for return on investment. You need high margin to fund the next bit of technology. Thats the hope at least, in case your technology fails.
What difference does it make if they make a jaguar or a zen? Well cost. Fundamentally what it comes down to. PS4, XBO, 4Pro are all tooled for Jaguar, wouldn't it be cheaper to also fab Scorpio as well, no significantly retooling may be required. But Zen, could be a lot more effort there. I'm not going to pretend i know all the answers, but I can't respond to your questions because you've already made Jaguar and Zen cost equivalent.
I work for a telco today, we still sell standard land line 2 pair to home style phone. That's pure profit, the infrastructure is fully paid off, there are virtually no costs for us to set it up. But we switch to something like ADSL and even though it uses 2 pair to run the service over, it's not nearly as profitable, the infrastructure is not paid off, and a big chunk of the revenue goes towards paying for the capital costs invested for the technology.
And so that's why prices are different and that's why prices are more expensive when new technologies roll out, vs old technologies that have already paid their own capital costs off.
I really don't know what else to say honestly. I've touched on how they can get around not having Zen by using technologies like ExecuteIndirect. I've touched on price points. We've touched all over Lisa Su's investor call. I've been given no indication/hints that Zen is coming to Xbox from my connections. I think collectively we have written exhaustively (many vectors) as to why Zen would not be in Scorpio. But we have not done the same in reverse argument, it's been certainly repetitive, but not exhaustive (few vectors).
At this point I'm out of ideas. I cannot come up with anything else, I'm just going to wait for more information before discussing the CPU of Scorpio again.
So i'm still confused at this.
I get your story about the pickles but I don't see how it applies to AMD. AMD sells chips. The have a factory that makes chips. How is it different if this factory makes jaguar or zen chips ? Every jaguar wafer that AMD makes is one less Zen wafer. So if MS wants 1 million Jaguar wafers that is 1m zen wafers that AMD can't make and sell for servers or consumers. IF MS instead makes 1m Zen wafers ... its the same thing..
Actually IF AMD is making millions of Zens for MS it could be a benfit to AMD since they will keep the fabs running producing a chip and getting data back to improve yields. Also if MS needs 8 core zens and 6tflop gpus in a single APU package the ones that fail and may only be 8 cores but 4 tflops or 6 cores and so on can then be sold into the retail channel for AMD to make profits on instead of eating the costs
I figure that zen would cost more since it is bigger than jaguar. I get that but the APU in scorpio will still be larger and require different tooling than other jaguar apus anyway.
But I guess its not much longer till we find out.
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