No. The number of people who need HEDT is small.So do you agree with me that there is a sizeable customer base that affords and desires HEDT but is also price sensitive?
I would guess that if I polled 100 of my colleagues and friends about HEDT, including several of whom who buy a lot of computer equipment, not a single one would have any idea whatsoever what HEDT actually is.So do you agree with me that there is a sizeable customer base that affords and desires HEDT but is also price sensitive?
No. The number of people who need HEDT is small.
I was talking relative to the HEDT addressable market, not the entire desktop market. It was claimed that HEDT customers are price insensitive, because they are either wealthy enough or enthusiast enough to desire only the best. For example, they would automatically choose 6900K over 6800k or 6850k.Compared to their mainstream chips, this market is tiny.
Your post actually referred to the entire world, not just the desktop market. I was just saying that it is not a sizable market. The number of people who want more than a 7700k but less than a professional workstation are small. This small subset generally is often not in it for price as the main consideration. Of course, some of them are concerned with price, but that is often a secondary or tertiary consideration.I was talking relative to the HEDT addressable market, not the entire desktop market. It was claimed that HEDT customers are price insensitive, because they are either wealthy enough or enthusiast enough to desire only the best. For example, they would automatically choose 6900K over 6800k or 6850k.
Do you also think most people who could use a HEDT system don't care about the cost of their build?
On that website the 6900K is just as popular as many of Intel's recent mainstream desktop and mobile processors. Care to comment?I don't have a list of Intel processor sales for each chip (does anyone?). But there are plenty of websites that list which chips have used the website. For example, take this one: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/share30.html
The 6900k is nearly triple the number of users on that website (0.8%) compared to the 6850k (0.3%) or 6800k (0.3%). Thus, yes, most HEDT users of that website did automatically choose the 6900k even though it was far more expensive. That is limited to users of that website, yes. But I bet it is indicative of HEDT users as a whole.
You can't honestly compare HEDT to desktop that way. The best you can do is to compare within a class.On that website the 6900K is just as popular as many of Intel's recent mainstream desktop and mobile processors. Care to comment?
I didn't suggest that at all...it was wildhorse2k...You're the one suggesting people don't buy Intel's fastest chips because they can't afford them, whereas many of us have pointed out that CPU speed is just one of many factors to consider. If your contention made any sense, the 1% would only ever buy the fastest CPUs but obviously that is not the case. Most people just don't care as much about raw CPU speed as you seem to.
Fair enough.The best you can do is to compare within a class.
True but as people say. For a hobby to be performance oriented PC's are one of the cheapest hobbies to get into. Therefore not everyone buying HEDT are people that can just look at a CPU and say F'it. Most people even the ones that have made it good after spending their highschool days putting PC's together from the scraps that they could pick up, still recognize a bad deal when they see one. There is a reason why the people lining up for the 6950 is so much smaller than the 6900, which is so much larger than the 6800 and 6850. With in the line up of more cores, memory, and IO. The 6900 offer more for the money than a 6850, and tons more value than the 6950.I think the point was that people who have the money generally buy the fastest parts. They generally don't bargain shop.
Also people who want bragging rights and benchmarks generally don't bargain shop. They willingly pay more for that 10% extra performance.
There are a few exceptions of course.
People in the Porsche/BMW/Audi and up brackets generally don't even look into the Ford and Chevy lots.
For a short time now, RyZen has captured a bit more of the market, with Intel caught between chips.
We will have to wait and see how long that lasts.
They are price sensitive, but less so than your average computer user/builder, imo. Not to the point of sacrificing too much performance, imo.So do you agree with me that there is a sizeable customer base that affords and desires HEDT but is also price sensitive?
I think AMD has to make some money back at some point, and threadripper just might be priced for profits.True but as people say. For a hobby to be performance oriented PC's are one of the cheapest hobbies to get into. Therefore not everyone buying HEDT are people that can just look at a CPU and say F'it. Most people even the ones that have made it good after spending their highschool days putting PC's together from the scraps that they could pick up, still recognize a bad deal when they see one. There is a reason why the people lining up for the 6950 is so much smaller than the 6900, which is so much larger than the 6800 and 6850. With in the line up of more cores, memory, and IO. The 6900 offer more for the money than a 6850, and tons more value than the 6950.
ThreadRipper at a reasonable cost would shake that up by offering those same resources and more for the money. That's not to say a lot of people won't take wildhorse's train of thought and run with it. People still like value more than hate it. If I can get more computing power for equal or less and it's in the range of what I am looking for I'd purchase that. The better comparison would be that i7 EE stuff is the BMW, ThreadRipper is the Audi, Ryzen is the Chevy, and the base i7 is a Toyota. There will still be Beamer guys, like there will still be Intel only people that will just buy "the best", but I think there are a lot of people that just care about how fast the CPU is in the stuff that they do at home and will jump on the best option for them. ThreadRipper's advantage is that most of these tasks are highly MT'd which gives them a heads up since they have more cores than Intel can supply for a while.
AMD (Intel too) is in a bad spot. Even if they succeed in retaking the client market from Intel, they are still stuck with a declining/terminal market, and unlike Intel, AMD does not have a significant product line outside of PC. Intel is at least trying to survive the PC market extinction by diversifying to non-CPU product lines (e.g. memory and connectivity), although the effectiveness is yet to be seenAMD is ruining its profits bad enough by selling unlocked CPUs that get OCed and reach almost the same frequencies like their top processors, because they actually can't produce bad processors at all. So they are getting peanuts while customers get good value. Now that CPU performance doesn't increase very fast per year, market share may be something not worth more than actual profits as people will not be upgrading from those Ryzens 1700 for a long time.
There is always that looming in the background. The PC market is doomed. Just how much money can you afford to put into desktop cpus these days?AMD (Intel too) is in a bad spot. Even if they succeed in retaking the client market from Intel, they are still stuck with a declining/terminal market, and unlike Intel, AMD does not have a significant product line outside of PC. Intel is at least trying to survive the PC market extinction by diversifying to non-CPU product lines (e.g. memory and connectivity), although the effectiveness is yet to be seen
I think AMD has to make some money back at some point, and threadripper just might be priced for profits.
I don't think PC market will go extinct. The problem is a.) we already have more CPU performance than we need b.) CPU performance is increasing very slowly, thus customers are postponing upgrades.
But those systems need to be upgraded periodically. It will be interesting to see if 2 companies can survive on the market. AMD need to become profitable very fast and not sell CPUs for scraps.
Who's "we"? The people who are looking forward to Skylake-X? Mind you that among them are people who went from a 6950X to a 7700K.a.) we already have more CPU performance than we need
It's not that simple. There is far more to the cost of a cpu than the cost of the chip itself. There is research and development, validation, marketing, distribution, etc. Now I have no idea how these costs are assigned to ryzen, but ultimately they must be paid. So the real profit on a chip is far less than just subtracting the die cost from the selling price.[/QUOTE]This will be the point that makes or breaks pricing. What is scraps? I mean reasonably a Zeppelin die costs what $50? So two for ThreadRipper is $100. Once you are making a profit, demand is just if not more important than selling price. There is a curve to sales and while the profit of $100 chip selling for 2k is pretty tasty and something Intel enjoys right now. It's likely AMD could sell more than twice the amount of those CPU's at 1k. I don't think the 16c parts will sell that cheaply but the point still stands. A R7 still has $250 of margin at it lowest and just 1 million of those sold is still 250 million of profit If they sell this at $900 profit at 10,000k sales vs. 2000 at $1.9k profit. That still 9 Million in profits versus 3.8. AMD needs high revenues, higher cash flow, and yes higher ASP. But the ASP isn't nearly as important.
[/QUOTE]It's not that simple. There is far more to the cost of a cpu than the cost of the chip itself. There is research and development, validation, marketing, distribution, etc. Now I have no idea how these costs are assigned to ryzen, but ultimately they must be paid. So the real profit on a chip is far less than just subtracting the die cost from the selling price.
My vision of the HEDT market has always been a self-fulfilling market: it's YouTube PC reviewers and Twitch streamers, the very people that make money using the platforms they push. They need all the cores and speed for video encoding or streaming. Everyone else has an i3 or i5.