MD unveiled its new Radeon RX 5700 line of graphics cards with 7nm chips at E3 last month, and with just days to go before they launch on July 7th, the company has announced new pricing. In the "spirit" of competition that it says is "heating up" in the graphics market -- specifically NVIDIA's "Super" new RTX cards -- all three versions of the graphics card will be cheaper than we thought.
The standard Radeon RX 5700 with 36 compute units and speeds of up to 1.7GHz was originally announced at $379, but will instead hit shelves at $349 -- the same price as NVIDIA's RTX 2060. The 5700 XT card that brings 40 compute units and up to 1.9GHz speed will be $50 cheaper than expected, launching at $399. The same goes for the 50th Anniversary with a slightly higher boost speed and stylish gold trim that will cost $449 instead of $499.
That's enough to keep them both cheaper than the $499 RTX 2070 Super -- we'll have to wait for the performance reviews to find out if it's enough to make sure they're still relevant.
AMD fires back at 'Super' NVIDIA with Radeon RX 5700 price cuts
AMD missed analyst estimates on their stock and lost 5% of their value overnight, now down over 7% since their earnings were revealed. Considering CPUs have been selling like hotcakes, it has to be Radeon collecting dust on the shelves. AMD lumps Radeon in with CPU when reporting earnings, so we can't tell what they're hiding. AMD's pricing strategy is not working for them, and RTG is in such a state they can't fix it. nVidia' s down too, but their stock is still over 4x as valuable as AMD, and they're posting record profits so their casualty is due to the sinking stocks due to the coronavirus (supposedly), whereas AMD had a major selloff right after their earnings reveal.
Interesting bit of news from the Intel camp today: 3DMark results. Intel Xe DG1 is up to 40% faster than the 7nm Vega GPU in the upcoming Ryzen 4000 series APUs. That's an interesting result considering Vega has been refined multiple times, and Xe is still quite deep in development and optimization. Hopefully someone at RTG will take this as their "OH S**T!" moment and start pricing in terms of this reality and get their software up to snuff before mainstream Xe gets to market, because this surprises the heck out of me that the mobile variant (Tiger Lake, far right) is able to perform so favorably to the 4700U.
https://www.wccftech.com/intel-xe-dg1-gpu-benchmarks-leak-40-percent-faster-than-amd-7nm-vega/
It's official today. AMD launched their new Raise The Game promo, and the RX 5600XT is NOT a qualifying card. Note that Warcraft III Reforged is so terrible Blizzard is handing out refunds no questions asked, Ghost Recon Breakpoint has abysmal reviews, and Resident Evil 3 will not even be available for 2 more months, so the amount of value that these "free games" add is extremely subjective.
https://www.amd.com/en/gaming/raise-the-game
AMD has altered the Raise The Game bundle and REMOVED Warcraft III Reforged. The only card to have been eligible for it was Warcraft III anyway.
Came across this article the other day. Apparently ASUS discontinued the original 5700/XT TUF Gaming cards because of, well, self destruction, and replaced them with TUF EVO Gaming models which feature a number of improvements, including a totally new heatsink design, a 2.7 slot design, higher clocks, and a 144 hour validation period. TechPowerUp's article states ASUS will be pricing these the same as the previous non EVO models, so $420 for the XT and $380 for the non XT, going by Newegg's pricing.
Funny though, on the ASUS product page, they are targeting this card at 1920x1080...
https://www.wccftech.com/asus-revises-the-rx-5700-and-rx-5700-xt-series-tuf-gaming-graphics-card/
https://www.techpowerup.com/263454/asus-revises-rx-5700-series-tuf-gaming-with-axial-tech-fans-and-new-heatsink-underneath
Thankfully I thought ahead, and got the Corsair C70 case (one of the best cases EVER, hate it's discontinued). I have my 280mm Corsair H115i mounted on the top drawing in outside air, and have space for a 120mm radiator on the rear as well as a 120mm or 240mm radiator mounted on the back of the drive cages.
But thankfully node shrinks are coming fast and quick these days. nVidia's going to 7nm which should do wonders for them, AMD is going to 7nm+ EUV which should trim 10-20% or so off theirs combined with RNDA2 improvements, 5nm will be ready by the second half of this year and is what Zen 4, and hopefully new AMD architecture, will be based on in 2021/2, and presumably there will be a 5nm+ node in 2022/3 before 3nm hits in 2024/5.
It really doesn't seem like processes advanced as fast as they did, but really I guess it's just because it's been ages since CPUs have gained so much power every generation. GPUs...has yet to be seen, so processes were not really at the forefront. I imagine we can also thank the explosion of cell phones and IoT devices for the demand for tiny, efficient, cheap processors as well.
WCCFTech put out an interesting article today about something only investors would look at. AMD's credit sales, things they haven't been paid a dime for yet, noted as "accounts receivable", grew 50% over the past year, and account for $1.859 billion of their declared assets, or 40% of their total. While the money amount isn't a flag, the fact it grew 50% in a year can be as the market expects AMD to average 44% free cash flow growth per year over the next 7 years. Looking at these two facts really shows how imperative it is for the GPU division to succeed especially in the professional sector, where they can shift hundreds to thousands of high margin units at one time.
Another disturbing fact is that another benchmark of Intel's Tiger Lake has emerged at Sisoft Sandra showing it to be about as powerful as the PS4's APU. While this may not seem like a big deal at this point and time, when it comes time for console refreshes, there's little doubt Intel will be in the discussion, and little doubt they will be willing to take a loss in order to land one, if not both, consoles, which will hamper AMD's future growth.
https://www.wccftech.com/amd-credit-sales-grew-50-in-2019-current-price-justified-only-by-astronomical-44-growth-over-next-seven-years/
https://www.wccftech.com/intel-tiger-lake-cpu-powerful-gpu-leaked-ps4/
If you want to play percentages, AMD's sock has increased ~24x in the last 40 years, while nVidia's stock has increased ~152x in the last 21 years. Also, AMD's stock history shows a three major crashes with numerous minor fluctuations until Ryzen was released, which brought the value back up to what it was about 20 years ago. nVidia's on the other hand had been relatively flat for many years followed by a massive spike, a sell off, and then a rebound trend which is projected to match or exceed its previous high.
For the average investor or investment company, AMD would have been categorized as a medium to high risk, and I imagine quite a number of people lost a lot of money following the 2005 crash from $40 a share to $2 a share. nVidia on the other hand was a low risk stock, maintaining or slowly growing its value for the first 15 years followed by a massive spike. AMD was basically an uninvestable stock for over a decade as values dropped under $2 and there were even rumors of Dell buying the company.
Over the last 20 years, nVidia would have netted you a -much- greater return than AMD, as their price in 2000 on Jan 31st was $3.19, and AMD's on the same date was $18, so you would only have a 2.7x ROI for AMD, whereas you would have had a 75.34x ROI from nVidia...
