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submitted 3 days ago by genfood@feddit.org to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 109 points 3 days ago

AMD too?

So, assuming that Intel is also on the wrong side of history as usual (and that their cards are actually good for gaming, of which I'm not convinced) , you literally can't buy a decent gaming GPU without paying into the AI nonsense?

[-] 9point6@lemmy.world 57 points 2 days ago

Nope sadly, AI needs GPUs and it makes up the bulk of sales of these chips now.

It would be suicide for any of the companies that could make these processors to not go after the biggest market. The result of a company not doing that would be watching all their competitors grow and advance their products whilst their company's value drops and products stagnate, possibly to a point that recovery to competitiveness would be hard if not impossible.

[-] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 39 points 2 days ago

When AMD's biggest market was Litecoin (and derivatives like Dogecoin) mining and Nvidia's hardware was pants at mining, they initially couldn't increase production of the HD 7000 series quickly enough, so the initial glut of money went to scalpers. They responded by making huge volumes for the Rx 200 series, but shortly after it launched, Litecoin mining ASICs became available and GPU mining stopped being viable. That meant that:

they'd spent lots of money manufacturing lots of GPUs.
miners were selling used GPUs for a fraction of the retail cost while those cards were still the current generation.
people didn't want to buy a new card for several times the price of the same card but used for a few months.
retailers had to drop prices to keep selling new cards.
wholesale prices had to drop to keep retailers stocking new cards.
AMD weren't making any profit when they sold these cards.
the RX 300 cards weren't compelling compared to a massively discounted RX 200 card, so they didn't sell in huge quantities or with good margins, either.

This wasn't the only time ATi/AMD took a calculated risk and it backfired horribly, so with their history of bad luck, chasing the AI bubble in any way that involves risk instead of just selling things for money might be a bad idea.