supernova8
Banned
Both Nvidia and AMD are releasing new GPUs in the next few months (Nvidia next month, AMD unconfirmed but presumably not long after). I purchased shares for both companies because I think both will grow long-term in their own ways so you can rest assured I'm not a 'fanboy' either way - just very interested to see how it pans out this coming Autumn.
AMD vs Intel
Look back to 2017 and the release of the first Ryzen CPUs. They were pretty good but still not good enough to beat Intel's offerings. Reviews were generally positive along the lines of "great but not quite there" and yet fast forward to 2020 and AMD has pretty much obliterated Intel's entire line of CPUs, including server CPUs. The only thing keeping Intel in the race is their massive production capacity but even that's at risk since they cannot seem to get to 7nm on their own, and may be held hostage by TSMC's capacity. We're seeing more and more OEMs putting Ryzen into their desktop and laptop offerings and Intel has nothing to counter with. In other words, it only took 3 years (from initial product) for AMD to completely turn the tables.
AMD vs NVIDIA
Turning our attention to the land of graphics cards, the story is a little different. While Intel can certainly be accused of complacency, and trying to squeeze as much profit out of the same node as possible, NVIDIA has taken a different approach. For the most part, NVIDIA has continued to iterate and innovate with their products (barring a few product name bait and switch fiascos), and while their products have become eye-wateringly expensive in recent years, on the whole they have provided big performance improvements over the years, regardless of what the competition puts out.
Up until now, AMD hasn’t really provided any real competition to NVIDIA but we’ve seen the first signs of it with RDNA1 (ie 5700 XT and the rest of the family). While not as powerful as NVIDIA’s top-end cards and having lingering driver issues, this has been the first time in a while that people could really justify picking Radeon over GeForce. Decent performance for a decent price - "great but not quite there".
What will happen in late 2020?
My personal expectation is that a lot of the lessons learned from building Ryzen into a wildly successful product line will transfer over to Radeon, and one should also not underestimate the fact that AMD is essentially getting help from two massive tech companies - Sony and Microsoft - in the process of designing both Ryzen and RDNA architectures. Nvidia is kinda on their own (cannot really count Nintendo since they will never use Nvidia's cutting-edge tech).
But it's a tough call. I have faith in both Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) and Lisa Su (AMD) to do what's necessary for their respective companies to succeed. NVIDIA is not like Intel in the sense that Intel has so many fingers in so many different pies, NVIDIA doesn't do x86 CPUs and therefore can focus its efforts more on graphics technology. AMD has to fight a war on two fronts - x86 CPU/APU battle with Intel and GPU battle with NVIDIA. I wonder if AMD has the ability to fight both (and fight successfully) at the same time.
Exciting, isn't it!
AMD vs Intel
Look back to 2017 and the release of the first Ryzen CPUs. They were pretty good but still not good enough to beat Intel's offerings. Reviews were generally positive along the lines of "great but not quite there" and yet fast forward to 2020 and AMD has pretty much obliterated Intel's entire line of CPUs, including server CPUs. The only thing keeping Intel in the race is their massive production capacity but even that's at risk since they cannot seem to get to 7nm on their own, and may be held hostage by TSMC's capacity. We're seeing more and more OEMs putting Ryzen into their desktop and laptop offerings and Intel has nothing to counter with. In other words, it only took 3 years (from initial product) for AMD to completely turn the tables.
AMD vs NVIDIA
Turning our attention to the land of graphics cards, the story is a little different. While Intel can certainly be accused of complacency, and trying to squeeze as much profit out of the same node as possible, NVIDIA has taken a different approach. For the most part, NVIDIA has continued to iterate and innovate with their products (barring a few product name bait and switch fiascos), and while their products have become eye-wateringly expensive in recent years, on the whole they have provided big performance improvements over the years, regardless of what the competition puts out.
Up until now, AMD hasn’t really provided any real competition to NVIDIA but we’ve seen the first signs of it with RDNA1 (ie 5700 XT and the rest of the family). While not as powerful as NVIDIA’s top-end cards and having lingering driver issues, this has been the first time in a while that people could really justify picking Radeon over GeForce. Decent performance for a decent price - "great but not quite there".
What will happen in late 2020?
My personal expectation is that a lot of the lessons learned from building Ryzen into a wildly successful product line will transfer over to Radeon, and one should also not underestimate the fact that AMD is essentially getting help from two massive tech companies - Sony and Microsoft - in the process of designing both Ryzen and RDNA architectures. Nvidia is kinda on their own (cannot really count Nintendo since they will never use Nvidia's cutting-edge tech).
But it's a tough call. I have faith in both Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) and Lisa Su (AMD) to do what's necessary for their respective companies to succeed. NVIDIA is not like Intel in the sense that Intel has so many fingers in so many different pies, NVIDIA doesn't do x86 CPUs and therefore can focus its efforts more on graphics technology. AMD has to fight a war on two fronts - x86 CPU/APU battle with Intel and GPU battle with NVIDIA. I wonder if AMD has the ability to fight both (and fight successfully) at the same time.
Exciting, isn't it!
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