In my opinion, as long as AMD has the current strategy, it will always be behind Nvidia, because they don’t care about their discrete GPU business, they care about their customised hardware business first, and the discrete GPUs are just cheap knockoffs (nvidia -100€=AMD dGPU) released for some additional profit on the side.
That’s what’s keeping the lights on. If they sunk the extra billions into making their discrete cards genuinely superior to Nvidia’s (which already means taking it for granted that selling comparable products for less money makes them knockoff rather than superior), then Nvidia could stop them recouping the development costs by eating into their own margins to drop their prices. Over the last decade or two, ATi/AMD’s big gambles have mostly not paid off, whereas Nvidia’s have, so AMD can’t afford to take big risks, and the semi-custom part of the business is huge long-term orders that mean guaranteed profit.
In my opinion, as long as AMD has the current strategy, it will always be behind Nvidia, because they don’t care about their discrete GPU business, they care about their customised hardware business first, and the discrete GPUs are just cheap knockoffs (nvidia -100€=AMD dGPU) released for some additional profit on the side.
That’s what’s keeping the lights on. If they sunk the extra billions into making their discrete cards genuinely superior to Nvidia’s (which already means taking it for granted that selling comparable products for less money makes them knockoff rather than superior), then Nvidia could stop them recouping the development costs by eating into their own margins to drop their prices. Over the last decade or two, ATi/AMD’s big gambles have mostly not paid off, whereas Nvidia’s have, so AMD can’t afford to take big risks, and the semi-custom part of the business is huge long-term orders that mean guaranteed profit.