Question on AMD's pricing scheme

[Vishera]

If AMD were to include an iGPU on their next line of consumer chips and also increase the clockspeed to match Intel's, how much of a price difference do you think we'll see? How much of Ryzen's price would you say comes from it being, on average, a full GHz shower than Intel CPUs and not having an iGPU?

I figure if they at least manage to manufacture a chip that equals the speeds of Intel's consumer lineup at the time, or at least the speeds they've gone with for Skylake and Kaby Lake (4GHz+) then we'll probably see a $20 price increase over what the equivalent Ryzen chip would be. So the 1500X's replacement would be $210 instead of $190. And honestly, I still don't think that's a necessarily bad price shift especially if they improve upon the IPC even further.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

We will see Ryzen APU in the 2nd half of this year.

Not sure about comparing the AMD APU to anything Intel's got. Intel iGPU is going to be garbage in comparison really......

 

[Vishera]

We will see Ryzen APU in the 2nd half of this year.

Not sure about comparing the AMD APU to anything Intel's got. Intel iGPU is going to be garbage in comparison really......

I was more referring to doing away with APU and just having all of their chips include an iGPU.

 

[bassnut]

I was more referring to doing away with APU and just having all of their chips include an iGPU.

BUT ....... Why include an IGPU?

 

[Bluefalcon13]

BUT ....... Why include an IGPU?

My biggest draw to this concept would be to do an adaptive gfx solution, similar to Optimus, but with the hopes that it would be more seem less and better optimized, as the drivers would be from the same manufacturer. I know this is mostly wishful thinking but it would be pretty sweet to have a Ryzen, not over clocked, sipping power, and a dGPU that was completely off when it wasn't needed.

Again, I realize this is mostly wishful thinking, as APU + dGPU integrations have been meh for many years at this point.

 

[ssjwizard]

I was more referring to doing away with APU and just having all of their chips include an iGPU.

Really the only thing this would accomplish is to add unnecessary die complexity and TDP to the top model chips. I think that AMD current market segmentation makes sense. This generations APUs will feature 4 Ryzen cores and some amount of Vega GPU cores. For the typical user this is going to me more than sufficient even as a casual gamer. Users who want more power than this are going to want to customize the system and likely want a much more powerful GPU solution that what is reasonably going to fit onto an AIO die anyways.

With this generation they merged that CPU and APU platforms onto a single set of motherboards, so really I think that the way they are targeting the current market is quite efficient.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

I was more referring to doing away with APU and just having all of their chips include an iGPU.

The iGPU added to a CPU is why they call it an APU...... ???

 

[Vishera]

Intel has decided to put an iGPU on their CPUs. AMD has chosen not to. What I'm wondering is how much of the price difference between AMD and Intel can be attributed to AMD choosing to only put an iGPU on their APUs, which are crippled CPU wise to make room for the graphics portion. And it has to be somewhat why they're cheaper.

 

[ssjwizard]

Realistically the current Ryzen lineup is more intended to compete with Intel X99 line of chips which you will also note do not have iGPU included.

 

[Bluefalcon13]

Honestly, I wouldn't mind an onboard gpu... Even if it was completely disabled with a dedicated card. Burn up my GPU folding? Rig isn't offline for other tasks, just rma the GPU and run on onboard for my school crap for the time being.

It can be a nice bonus feature if your GPU dies under warranty.

 

[ssjwizard]

Honestly, I wouldn't mind an onboard gpu... Even if it was completely disabled with a dedicated card. Burn up my GPU folding? Rig isn't offline for other tasks, just rma the GPU and run on onboard for my school crap for the time being.

It can be a nice bonus feature if your GPU dies under warranty.

I mean yes Ill give you that, but the Intel iGPU is barely enough to run day to day tasks. I mean I guess if AMD were to put like a single CU worth of GPU onto the top end chips it wouldn't cost all that much and be about the same.

 

[Bluefalcon13]

I mean yes Ill give you that, but the Intel iGPU is barely enough to run day to day tasks. I mean I guess if AMD were to put like a single CU worth of GPU onto the top end chips it wouldn't cost all that much and be about the same.

That's not entirely true, my i7-7500u can play civ (the colonization one set in the future, it was a bit chunky but the game worked fine considering it's not an fps or something...) @4k on minimal. General use isn't a problem on it. Web + coding in Matlab/python and generating graphs and such aren't a problem either.

 

[Vishera]

I mean yes Ill give you that, but the Intel iGPU is barely enough to run day to day tasks. I mean I guess if AMD were to put like a single CU worth of GPU onto the top end chips it wouldn't cost all that much and be about the same.

Dude I could run GameCube emulation on my 4460's iGPU almost as well as on my 750. That's nothing to sneeze at.

 

[RJ88]

It's whack dude, could go out right now and get like Z97 and that would still be an upgrade to me Lol and you could find that for change now even.

 

[Alaric]

There is a rumor that Intel is looking at an AMD sourced solution for the GPU in their iGPU chips. http://www.pcworld.com/article/3147...d-gpus-to-challenge-nvidias-rising-power.html
That should pretty well cover, and bury, Intel's iGPU forays with in-house GPUs.

 

[Vishera]

So if AMD had released Ryzen at clockspeeds equivalent to Intel chips (4GHz+) how much different do you think the price would have been? I honestly wish there was a way to test Ryzen at "Intel speeds". I get the feeling a 4.7GHz 1700 would be pretty nice for video editing and streaming.

 

[Alaric]

It already beats the LGA 2011 chips at its current speeds in multi threaded tasks. AMD was going to undercut Intel's pricing one way or another. Between Intel's recent dominance and what appears to now be in AMD's corporate DNA ("But AMD chips cost less!) I can't imagine a scenario where AMD will price chips higher than Team Blue, unless they pull a magic binary bunny out of their collective hat and completely rewrite the CPU performance book.

 

[mackerel]

https://www.techpowerup.com/215333/intel-skylake-die-layout-detailed

On the APU, I'm reminded of images like the one in the link above showing how much die area is taken by respective parts. Roughly speaking, on the shown Intel example the GPU part is comparable to the 4 CPU cores in area. If Intel were to remove the iGPU they could make a ton more CPUs per wafer. Alternatively, replace the iGPU with more cores. 8 cores for the same manufacturing cost!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k/4

Here's something similar for previous AMD although not marked exactly what is what in these shots, the CPU cores are to the left with the GPU cores on the right. As an area ratio, I think we're looking at something similar.

Of course, die area is only indicative of that part of manufacturing cost, but how much they sell for will depend on other factors. I wonder if anyone has come up with some sort of die area per $ metric for retail priced products?

On the Intel - AMD rumour, I wouldn't take it to be any more than Intel simply requiring certain IP to keep making its existing iGPU line and future evolutions. If AMD can provide that cheaper than nvidia, why not?

 

[Woomack]

IGP is good only for office computers and all those who are not playing any newer games. In most cases it looks like non-gaming laptops and office laptops/desktops. Right now AMD is almost not existing on the laptop market.
Regardless if it's AMD or Intel IGP, in both cases graphics performance is too low to play any new games at reasonable settings. Most gamers stick to 1080p nowadays for what IGP isn't good enough and I'm not even starting with 2k/4k on IGP as it sounds stupid.
IGP could be good if it was saving power like mentioned optimus in laptops but it's also not so good idea as most users who have higher power graphics card don't care about 10W difference and most new top performance gfx cards have low power usage in 2D mode.

I don't know if you noticed but last APU generation was looking like high CPU+highest GPU, mid CPU+mid GPU, low CPU+low GPU. There was no way to buy APU with lower CPU power and higher GPU. At the end most AMD IGP were as good as Intel's IGP. The only exception were maybe 2 highest chips but who will pay for the highest APU only to use still slow IGP ?
What I want so say here is that high IGP power in AMD APU doesn't mean anything to end users. It's good only in theory.

 

[mackerel]

I don't know if you noticed but last APU generation was looking like high CPU+highest GPU, mid CPU+mid GPU, low CPU+low GPU. There was no way to buy APU with lower CPU power and higher GPU. At the end most AMD IGP were as good as Intel's IGP. The only exception were maybe 2 highest chips but who will pay for the highest APU only to use still slow IGP ?
What I want so say here is that high IGP power in AMD APU doesn't mean anything to end users. It's good only in theory.

The CPU to GPU balance in laptops isn't limited to APUs, but also other GPUs. It seems the laptop manufacturers are still set on shouting about the CPU first, GPU second. When I was shopping for my now current laptop, I found it frustrating that I had to have a "high end" CPU if I wanted any level of GPU. In the end I got a 6700HQ and 970M. The HQ is listed as a $379 suggestion on Intel's page, whereas I think an equivalent i5 closer to $200 would have been more than sufficient, with the difference in cost maybe bumping me up a GPU grade which would have made more difference in gaming balance. As it was, the 970M is roughly comparable to a desktop 960, so "ok for 1080" if I resist the temptation to select Ultra. The 980M would have been more comfortable, but they only put that in the stupidly priced range of laptops. I didn't want it that badly...

Even today, there are even lower 900 series GPUs being sold in so called "gaming laptops". To swing this back to the topic at hand, the question is how good is good enough for any GPU? What is good enough for a "gaming laptop"? There's quite a gap between MOBA good and GTAV good for instance.