News AMD announces Ryzen 5 hex-core, quad-core line-up

Takes aim at Intel's Core-i5 family.
https://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2017/03/16/amd-ryzen-5/1

 

A 100% chance. That's how you make processors. Right now, though, the 7s that are sold as 5s will be faulty 7s because it's a new chip on a new process with a correspondingly low yield. In the future, as the yield improves, it's possible that there will be fully-functional Ryzen 7s sold as 5s just to balance demand - and that's when you start being able to potentially unlock them and run them as 7s.

 

The argument goes that no self-respecting enthusiast would be seen dead using a stock cooler - even a halfway decent one like Wraith - so there's no point giving 'em something that's going to end up in the bin anyway.

 

These are pure-CPU chips, for people using discrete graphics. The Zen-based APUs are coming later, as was always the case.

 

If it has an X suffix, then it's aimed at the enthusiast market. Simple as that. That's what the X suffix means.

Same with Intel's K suffix - or are you going to argue that the £180 dual-core Core i3-7350K is an entry-level part not aimed at enthusiasts? I mean, it is an i3, after all - so it must be entry-level, right?

High End usually equals Enthusiast, but Enthusiast does not always equal High End.

I'd say any graphics card that costs more than about £50 is clearly in the enthusiast region, and the 1060 certainly is - unless you're aware of any entry-level non-enthusiasts dropping 350 notes on watercooled graphics cards?

 

It absolutely is smart sales, yes, which is why every semiconductor company in the world does it.

You sell more of your cheaper products than your expensive products. Let's say for the last generation you sold three entry-level chips for every flagship chip. So, you build three million entry-level chips and one million flagship chips.

Trouble is, turns out you misjudged demand. There's only a market for 500,000 flagship chips, but your entry-level chips are flying off the shelves. Do you:

A) Cut the price of the flagship chip, irritating those that already bought them and damaging the value proposition and price at which you can sell future flagship chips?
B) Resign yourself to a warehouse filled with 500,000 unsold flagship chips and write it off as a loss, while irritating those who want to buy your entry-level chips because there's no more stock?
or
C) Lock down the high-level chips and repackage them as entry-level models then sell them, which meets demand for the entry-level part, gets you something for the high-end parts that would otherwise have been mouldering in a warehouse before heading to landfill, and pleases both the customers who wanted an entry-level part and can now buy one and those who bought the top-end model and who aren't about to see the thing's price slashed in half. Oh, and doesn't stop you from pricing the follow-up flagship at the same high level as its predecessor (but perhaps only making half as many this time).

If you answered anything other than C, then I'd advise against starting a technology business...

 

Here's the rub: you're talking about your personal opinion, whereas I'm talking about AMD and Intel's targeting. The marketing material makes it very clear: X and K chips are enthusiast products, non-X and non-K chips are mainstream. There are split markets within that, of course: i7s are performance, i5s mainstream, and i3s entry-level - but the 'enthusiast/non-enthusiast' is effectively differentiated by the suffix.

D'you want to tell that to Nvidia? Intel, perhaps? 'Cos they both do it. They all do it.

D'you want to try actually reading the explanation I gave, 'cos you seem to have missed the important part where the company involved did know they were going to sell more cheap chips than expensive ones.

Let's say you're going to make a product. Do you know exactly how many you're going to sell? Of course you don't. AMD - or Intel, or Nvidia, or Samsung, or A. N. Other company - can only forecast projected sales using previous sales data. For Ryzen, it's even more difficult: it's likely to sell more than any other chip family AMD has released in a decade, but by how many? Will the expensive chips sell well because they offer more threads than Intel's equivalents, or poorly because they're weaker for gaming?

Tell you what: you tell me how many R7s and R5s AMD is going to sell in this financial year. If you're within... let's say 10 per cent, I'll donate £50 to a charity of your choice. Easy money for charity, right? 'Cos you know exactly how many they'll sell, and therefore how many of each AMD would have to make?

EDIT:
Tell you what, let's simplify the example. You sell Widget A at £20 and Widget B at £30. You do your market research and predict that 30 people will buy Widget A, 'cos it's cheaper and has most of the features, while 10 people will splash out the extra for Widget B. So, you build 30 Widget As and 10 Widget Bs.

Time comes to sell 'em, and you've got 35 orders for Widget A but only 5 orders for Widget B. Problem, right?

So, if we follow your plan of keeping the Widget B as a Widget B, you end your financial year with £600 from selling all of your Widget As and an extra £150 from sales of the Widget Bs, but a £150 write-down of unsold inventory. Total revenue: £600. Number of pissed off customers: 5.

If you do the sensible thing and turn Widget Bs into Widget As, you get £600 from sales of Widget As, £100 from sales of Widget Bs turned into Widget As, and £150 from sales of the Widget Bs themselves, and you've sold all your inventory so there's no write-down. Total revenue: £850. Number of pissed off customers: 0.

Now, which one of those two approaches is going to be best for the company?