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.