Assuming 30% yields on a 200mm wafer, and assuming Zen's die size will be around 200mm squared looking at the recent die shot leak, AMD will need to sell the recently revealed 8-core Zen chips for $120 a piece in order to make 50% profit margins.
>each 200mm silicon wafer is $200 >processing each is an additional $1500-$1800 >a 10mm x 20mm Zen CPU would be able to fit onto this wafer 116 times >116 x 30% yields = 35 working CPUs >$2000 per wafer divided among 35 CPUs = $57 spent making each Zen CPU
A price point of $199 for Zen is totally doable in the long term, although they'll probably milk it for $250-$300 at first. Maybe even more.
Unless anyone has more info on Zen's costs and AMD's typical profit per CPU, and its yields, this seems like a pretty solid result.
AMD has used 300mm wafer for CPU since around 2004.
Jacob Perry
looks like shit
I'm buying Intel
Levi Gonzalez
monitoring
Owen Campbell
Let me plug that into my formula, then. That's good to hear, I haven't been able to find any info on wafer sizes.
A 300mm wafer would probably price closer to $350, with a processing cost closer to $2000.
188 per wafer, *.30 = 56 working chips
2300 / 56 = $41
Wyatt Brown
every body expected polaris to cost $400. The most optimists thought it would be $300. About the performances no one expected it to beat a GTX 980. Don't try to guess zen price and performances, they'll just surprise us and btfo intel like they did for nvidia.
Benjamin Davis
>30% aahaaahahahaaa
Zachary Thomas
AMD will never compete with Intel, they are just too far behind for a long time.
GPUs are a whole different scenario thank god.
Nathaniel Walker
Wafers are delicious.
Dominic Cruz
Sounds tasty, I'll eat computer wafer
Levi Ward
Why you all trying to start a shitfest? OP is literally just trying to guesstimate the cost of the new CPUs.
Ethan Davis
I'm curious, why is the yield for working chips always so low? I thought that we were 1337 in technology as humans, why is the yield not 99%?
I know there are imperfections in silicon wafers but don't we have tech to prevent them or is there some quantum gay shit fucking with us or something?
Adrian King
Mass producing the chips was never the costly part.
It's the R&D and employee costs.
Joseph Butler
Dust and human stuff
Jacob Robinson
This isn't even the best part. That 8-core Zen chip is to compete with at least stock i7-5960X performance.
A $300-$500 AMD chip is going to compete with a $1,100 intel chip.
Intel is fucking done.
Anthony Martin
suuuure
Daniel Ortiz
If $120 is a 50% profit margin I doubt it'll start out above $250 especially considering the price of previous AMD CPUs and the fact that AMD is trying to gain market share.
Nolan Roberts
Well that's good to hear user
Adam Sanders
Do we really need humans in processor manufacturing plants? Why not just send robots there? Is robots tech still fucking shit?
Jayden Thompson
I worked at the design and production of certain micro and nano structures for [secret project] using wafers and lithography systems and BY far the worst link in the chain are humans. The amount of things that humans fuck up is just amazing.
Isaiah Reed
Robots aren't perfectly clean either.
Angel Richardson
For real though Zen is going to fuck intel's shit up.
However I do worry AMD becoming jewish and wanting over $500 for their 8-core Zen chip.
Lucas Watson
How big is the polaris die size?
Carter James
most likely they'll have hasklel performance on 2017
Gabriel Watson
>For real though Zen is going to fuck intel's shit up. Said the increasingly nervous AMD fan for 100th time this decade.
Brody Morgan
It's not a "what if" anymore, AMD already tested the chips and found out they will shit all over intel.
That 8-core Zen chip has double the performance of the old 8-core FX processors. That's a huge fucking jump in performance.
We're talking about more than 40% IPC gains over Excavator nigga, Shit's about to go down.
Josiah King
the hype around zen is out of control (because AMD's marketing is based around hype when they know the product will be bad)
sticking with my 2600k until i see reviews
Camden Parker
14nm but it's really 16nm
Jonathan Miller
dude the 4790k has almost twice the single thread performance of a 8350, and the multi-thread performance on the fx series wasn't scaling as much as they must so twice of an 8350 doesn't seem like much to me.
Eli Torres
Are you mentally and physically retarded?
Adam Scott
>AMD will never compete with Intel Good thing you are not in charge of AMD.
Austin Williams
...
John Lee
This needs to stop.
Robert Garcia
So slower than a 4690K in single threaded applications?
Ryder Lewis
Not sure, this is multi-thread performance and we don't know what CPU clock frequency the Zen or Bulldozer chip was running at.
Evan Martinez
As much as I want AMD to succeed we all know deep inside that they will never reach the performance of Skylake-Kaby Lake with Zen. At least in terms of IPC which is the most important things nowadays.
Elijah Carter
Daily reminder that Zen has reached over 40% IPC jump over Excavator.
Just throwing a guess out there but that means a multi-core passmark of 8,000+... for the 4-core Zen variant... clocked at 3.5-3.8 GHz... yeah
>comparing a 3.5-3.8 GHz chip with one that turbos to 4.4 GHz retard
Logan Sanchez
Holy fuck, that is a rip-off, $500 dollarinos for a sandy vag i5?
Easton Martin
GHz is meaningless outside of the context of IPC and architecture.
Jeremiah Harris
>clock speed matters retard
Chase Perry
Sup Forums Technology
Nicholas Hall
comparing a NOBODY KNOWS WHAT FREQUESNCY with a 4ghz chip whit 4.4 turbo that was released on 2014.
Jordan Johnson
>intel >not being a jew pick one
Camden Turner
You forgot to include smt. Zen will include it.
Henry Jackson
Stupid Question, but why dont the manufactures just make a square wafer for higher yields and less waste? Or does it not work this way?
Jonathan Sanders
>>a multi-core passmark of 8,000+ >so cute your quote is talking about the 4 core variant, xen goes up to 8 cores
Chase Lewis
>$2000 per wafer divided among 35 CPUs = $57 spent making each Zen CPU >A price point of $199 for Zen is totally doable in the long term, although they'll probably milk it for $250-$300 at first. Maybe even more.
So now we resort to pulling numbers out of our ass, right ? Nevermind that AMD has over 9000 employees to pay.
If Zen is not some out of the ballpark smash hit AMD will trap itself once again with its pricing scheme
It will be a vicious cycle that goes like this..
AMD comes out with a new product.. it performs alright, buit intel keeps the performance crown To stay competitive against intel, AMD makes little or no money per CPU AMD cannot raise prices because then the competing Intel product in the same price range will kick its ass well better go back to the drawing board and try to make a new product..
>AMD hasn't made any money in ~4 years now
For AMD to make money , Zen's sales will have to be great/great OR they will have to price their chips higher, or some balance of both. Lets put it like this.. if Zen costs $300 it competes with the 6700K $200 = 6500 $220 = 6600 Zen will be priced based on its relative performance, and that in turn will dictate how much (if any) money AMD makes.
Elijah Davis
ok ... so comparing a nobody knows what freq. not even released (NOW WITH SMT) chip with an old 2014 4ghz chip (4.4 boost).
Hudson Rivera
it does not work this way
David Carter
You're an idiot if you think GHz is the only thing that matters in a CPU.
You're an idiot for even comparing it across vastly different architectures.
You probably don't even know what IPC stands for.
Landon Lee
So? i'm not even comparing with the current intel gen. 6800 has 6 cores, 6900 has 8 and 6950 has 10 cores.
Lucas Hernandez
Ur a idiot each wafer costs $2000 period.
Zen will be $200 and AMD can still make half descent money.
Matthew Jackson
Gotcha. i just did some reading and found out why they end up being round and that rectangular wafers dont work.
Leo Hall
It's because the pure silicon crystal they start with forms like an icicle and they slice it
Slicing it into a square would just take of small areas where chips could possibly be fabbed if they were small enough to fit, and many are
ARM chips can be as small as 50mm2 I think
On a square wafer, that's a loss of like 40% of your potential chips
Jace Sanchez
I think you retards are missing the point. Zen is NOT going to beat i7 skylake and probably not even i7 haswell. What it will do is take a huge shit all over haswell i5 and maybe even skylake i5 processors. That's all Zen needs to do and all that matters. Most people don't buy i7s, most get and i3 and some buy i5s.
But performance is not why people will buy Zen processors, that is just extra frosting on the cake. The reason people will buy Zen is because it will obliterate intel in value like it always has. The 4-core Zen variant could easily be sold for $100 and AMD could still make coin.
If a 4-core Zen processor has the same performance as an i5 and costs half as much then why on earth would people still chose intel? Not just in terms of multi-core performance but single-core performance which doesn't really matter much anymore to be honest.
Grayson Harris
Don't forget server profits, AMD hasn't gone after servers in a very long time
Zen is going after servers just as much as the first Opteron, which made mountains of cash
Eli Harris
Intel themselves recommend a price literally half of that for the 2500K, you illiterate nigger.
Juan Wright
>AMD can still make half decent money
Aiming for second place ,or in this case last place. Still doesn't look good, wont help their stocks, and wont please investors.
It very simple AMD needs to completely rethink how they make their CPUs and learn to compete with intel at the SAME level or they will ALWAYS be seen as the brand you go to if you are too fucking poor to afford the Top End product.
This whole "oh ours is cheaper but also doesn't perform equal to our competitors" will not work. People that are going to spend money on components want the best of the best without going into WTFBBQ price ranges. And Intel CPU's are priced just right for people to still consider paying for them and get superior performance to boot.
The only way AMD gets more per unit sales than intel is to basically give them away at a massive loss. i.e. Intel i7 sells for 300 AMD competing cpu sells for 50 bucks. It will never happen so they need to completely start over.
Jason Reyes
wasn't there going to be a 12 core desktop zen? Because that would be the one that I want
Cooper Cook
Jew detected
Joshua Martinez
AMD is going to be delusional and price the CPUs at the same level as intel, maybe with a $20 price cut, until the bad PR and backlash from it forces them to reduce prices by 50% just to sell anything.
they did the same shit with bulldozer and it irreparably harmed sales.
Jacob Walker
this
John Ross
>What it will do is take a huge shit all over haswell i5 and maybe even skylake i5 processors.
I remember something similar being said about faildozer and those CPU's ended up getting but fucked six ways till sunday by Nehalem when AMD claimed it was going to compete with/utterly destroy Sandy Bridge.
Zen will be the same. ie barly holding its own to ivy bridge
Oliver Martinez
Really? What was an FX-8120 worth at launch?
Ryder Lopez
>Zen will be the same. ie barly holding its own to ivy bridge Zen doesn't need much to destroy intel you know. Even if they only manage to reach i5 ivy bridge IPC then that s still great news for their 8-core flagship. In the end multi-core performance is what is going to matter as DX12 becomes more adopted and devs start writing programs with efficient multi-core support.
Evan Collins
are you a retard ? Do you understand AMD has other costs than simply wafer/processing costs ?
Do you go into a car dealership and whine about the prices and then bring up that steel costs $275 per ton and so Ford should sell you the truck for $2,000 and be happy with the profits you're bring them.
Because that is how stupid you look to everyone right now.
Ryder Peterson
$200 for 1/2 the performance of the equivalent sandy vagina gpu, aka garbage
Bentley Sullivan
>if Zen sells for less, Intel will keep the same prices! You know Intel is just fucking around at this point, right? Literally wasting over half of their die on a GPU? Zen not increasing CPU performance one bit doesn't really do much. So what if they force Intel's prices down? Everyone is already running at least a Sandy i5. "Moar cores" is not going to help my gaming.
Justin Gutierrez
a 6700k is slower than the 4790k kek
Andrew Gonzalez
MORE... CORES!!!!
Liam Parker
>$200 for 1/2 the performance of the equivalent sandy vagina gpu, aka garbage ???
>Single threaded performance is my biggest concern, and compared to Sandy Bridge there's a good 40-50% advantage the i5 2500K enjoys over the FX-8150. Its been the typical AMD story for like a decade if not more, AMD sucks in single threaded stuff and only shines in heavily threaded stuff.
Leo Thompson
I see, that is pretty bad.
Joseph Clark
>$499.6
what
Jackson Morris
>Its been the typical AMD story for like a decade if not more, AMD sucks in single threaded stuff and only shines in heavily threaded stuff. Except it hasn't, the lackluster single thread performance wasn't a thing until Bulldozer, that's less than 6 years
Liam Adams
>Not just in terms of multi-core performance but single-core performance which doesn't really matter much anymore to be honest. because it wont beat it in single core performance, and as retarded as it sounds the only thing my current AMD cpu bottlenecks me in is fucking Crysis 1
I'm going intel for CPU and never looking back
Brody Foster
Jim"kikes hitting the floor when they see my Zen core" Keller
Landon Nguyen
yes it is, the 4790k is great, but if you look at the image you'll see that while the 6700 has 200 points less (in single thread) it scores just 200 points less on multithread, so it seems that it scale better than the 4790 (or it'll be ~800poinst slower)
Hudson Edwards
Okay well you do that. The rest of the world will be getting Zen because no one gives a fuck about single-core performance now that we have things like Chrome and DX12.
pretty sure the difference in score is purely because of the lower turbo speed, the 6700k is ~10-15% faster than haslel clock for clock in most reviews.
Jason Wright
arma is probably the worst eastern-european shitcode the world has ever seen. it's an OOP mess with zero consideration for cache locality or parallelization, because it's based on code written in 1997 when both cpu caches and multiple cores were expensive luxuries.
Kevin Parker
O_O 4.2 turbo instead of 4.4 WHY?
Anthony Davis
AMD is just shilling for the Koreans that are still unsure of going all out in the CPU industry. Going to be interesting what happens if Zen is successful.
Liam Richardson
probably for lower voltages. 4400 -> 4200mhz is a 5% clock speed decrease on an architecture that brought a 10-15% performance increase across the board.
basically, intel is just trying to jew people with power efficiency because they have no pressure to sell higher core count CPUs or CPUs with beefier clock speed/larger cache/etc because of the lack of competition in the desktop space from amd, via and arm's licensees.
Kevin Butler
ok my mistake about the time frame.
it is hard to find good quality reviews from back then so I can't comment further about pre-bulldozer Plus of course Intel really, really sucked back then, it was all about the ghz for intel back then
likely thermal limitations.. but again.. don't get discouraged, clock for clock skylake *is* faster
Oliver Richardson
>30% yields
Connor Williams
I know, it's the only game i play, they've done some changes on the gfx recently and it works a little better (not much) and they're going to launch a new dlc with a more realistic map, but still drops to 30fps in their machine so...
i've heard that the ihs -> die thermal compound on the skylake chips is pretty bad and that they're not using enough amount of it, so it could be thermal limitation or just for power efficiency like said.
Easton Miller
*8150 ftfy
Joseph Butler
Summit Ridge is a $500 CPU competing against $600~ i7Es.
Stop regurgitating this $200 bullshit. AMD isn't trying to be the budget company any more, they don't want razor thin margins on their products. Raw cost to produce die doesn't factor in packaging, validation, transport, or headroom for vendor profit margins either.
Evan Martin
yeah aluminum frame and brake drums and engine block and.....
Ryder Hall
as i said replacing the thermal paste between ihs and die on skylake reduces ~18ยบ on load, not like I'm going to delide one to test, but it confirms that intel is using bad quality paste on skylake.
Michael Phillips
6700k cost ~300$ so zen must perform a lot better than that to cost 500$