All this information first appeared in an AdoredTV video, who has leaked a few things in the past. The Navi-related GPU rumors are probably the best point to start. The basics are: AMD is allegedly planning to release Navi-based RX…
All this information first appeared in an AdoredTV video, who has leaked a few things in the past. The Navi-related GPU rumors are probably the best point to start. The basics are: AMD is allegedly planning to release Navi-based RX 3080, RX 3070 and RX 3060 cards. The RX 3080 will be about 15% faster than Vega 64 at 150W, allowing it to compete with the RTX 2070, and it’ll be priced at $250. The RX 3070 will be around Vega 56 performance for $200, and the RX 3060 will be a 75W GPU at $130 competing with the GTX 1060.
Now at first glance, this sounds amazing. A $250 GPU from AMD competing with a $500 GPU from Nvidia. That sounds… well, it sounds unrealistic.
Starting with pricing, companies do not finalize price of their products this far ahead of launch. Even if we’re talking about a full unveil at CES, that show is roughly a month away. It’s quite common for us to receive a GPU or CPU under NDA maybe a week in advance, and it will only be a few days before launch that pricing is finalized. People in the industry have mentioned to us that typically pricing is decided about a week before launch.
While these sorts of products are designed around rough price targets – for example, mid-range, high-end, enterprise – the products are often finalized without an exact price point. The company would then figure out how much the product will cost to make based on yields and potential binning, factor in a margin, and only then decide on a price near launch after also factoring in current market conditions. So while it’s not out of the question to have rough specifications finalized well before launch, pricing and even final clock speeds often aren’t decided until much closer to the actual release.
Then for these GPUs, the pricing simply does not make sense from a number of angles. AMD may want to undercut Nvidia with their next generation of GPUs, that would make sense and they’ve done it in the past. But no sane company would choose to create a product and sell it for half the price of their only other competitor. So in our opinion it’s ridiculous to suggest AMD will release a Navi GPU at $250 that delivers performance equivalent to Nvidia’s $500 RTX 2070. It makes zero business sense and no executive at AMD would ever sign off on that.
If a company wanted to undercut its competitor you’d maybe be looking at a 20% lower price at best, so that would mean AMD coming in with an RTX 2070 equivalent for around $400. That would be more reasonable. But AMD isn’t going to sacrifice juicy margins just for the sake of “destroying” Nvidia.
