And that’s how it has been for a long time at AMD.
Look at CPUs, they were in a comfortable second place as the economy option for many years, and when they tried something new, it blew up in their face (Bulldozer).
Ryzen was all about the chiplet design first, and architecture improvements second. They didn’t go for the most innovative core design or smallest process (they didn’t even have a fab), they went for the economical option (chiplets have better yields). They were able to catch up with Intel with IPC gains, but Ryzen was pretty uninteresting aside from that. Even today, Zen 4 is just an iteration on the chiplet design, and they’re beating Intel because Intel struggled with lithography issues, and Intel is also trying novel things that haven’t resulted in a clear win vs AMD. So AMD is happy to attack yields (chiplets) and innovate by extension (add-on cache) instead of trying something radical with core design.
Their GPUs are going the same way. NVIDIA is trying hard with RT cores, whereas AMD mostly reused regular shader cores initially. NVIDIA is building a huge model for DLSS, AMD just applies a simple, one-size fits most filter on top. NVIDIA goes for the best experience for the high end, AMD just goes for a pretty good experience for most.
I don’t see that changing, that has been AMD’s main playbook since Intel overtook them after the x64 transition.
And that’s how it has been for a long time at AMD.
Look at CPUs, they were in a comfortable second place as the economy option for many years, and when they tried something new, it blew up in their face (Bulldozer).
Ryzen was all about the chiplet design first, and architecture improvements second. They didn’t go for the most innovative core design or smallest process (they didn’t even have a fab), they went for the economical option (chiplets have better yields). They were able to catch up with Intel with IPC gains, but Ryzen was pretty uninteresting aside from that. Even today, Zen 4 is just an iteration on the chiplet design, and they’re beating Intel because Intel struggled with lithography issues, and Intel is also trying novel things that haven’t resulted in a clear win vs AMD. So AMD is happy to attack yields (chiplets) and innovate by extension (add-on cache) instead of trying something radical with core design.
Their GPUs are going the same way. NVIDIA is trying hard with RT cores, whereas AMD mostly reused regular shader cores initially. NVIDIA is building a huge model for DLSS, AMD just applies a simple, one-size fits most filter on top. NVIDIA goes for the best experience for the high end, AMD just goes for a pretty good experience for most.
I don’t see that changing, that has been AMD’s main playbook since Intel overtook them after the x64 transition.