Early AMD Ryzen 9000 Zen 5 listings suggest lower prices than Zen 4

MarcusNumb said:

Wow, if those prices are true, this will be a huge kick in the nutts to Intel. Imagine at least 10% gain in IPC and 10% cheaper!!!!

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The exact opposite is true: this smacks of desperation. Given the inflation since the Zen4 launch and today, AMD is selling its latest products at a 20-25% discount, meaning it doesn't believe the performance gain warrants even parity pricing. AMD already leads in the DIY market, so pricing isn't likely to gain it market share there, and it'll take more than a 10% IPC boost to give it a better foothold among VARs.

(and please: before the fanboys attack, I've been 100% AMD in my home machines for several years now).

Yhe Endymio, it the true. and it's still unknown if this is the same cores on the laptop models which reduced lower-bit SIMD performance for this 10%.....

Endymio said:

The exact opposite is true: this smacks of desperation. Given the inflation since the Zen4 launch and today, AMD is selling its latest products at a 20-25% discount, meaning it doesn't believe the performance gain warrants even parity pricing. AMD already leads in the DIY market, so pricing isn't likely to gain it market share there, and it'll take more than a 10% IPC boost to give it a better foothold among VARs.

(and please: before the fanboys attack, I've been 100% AMD in my home machines for several years now).

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Parity pricing against what? Zen4 launch prices?

Zen4: new motherboard chipsets, new CPU socket, expensive manufacturing tech for chiplets, semi expensive manufacturing tech for IO die, top notch IO capabilities...

Zen5: no really new chipsets, old CPU socket, chiplets use (probably) cheaper manufacturing tech, IO die uses same (=cheaper because older manufacturing tech), IO capabilities stay same, no need to design new IO die...

Zen5 is much cheaper to manufacture than Zen4. To remind, Zen4 was considered too expensive on launch. 1+1=...

HardReset said:

Parity pricing against what? Zen4 launch prices?

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Yes.

HardReset said:

Zen4: new motherboard chipsets, new CPU socket, expensive manufacturing tech for chiplets, semi expensive manufacturing tech for IO die, top notch IO capabilities...

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Eh? You seem to be agreeing that Zen5 brings far less value to the table than its predecessor. And none of this changes the fact that when you reduce pricing 25% on equal volume, total revenue drops 25%. This isn't a positive for AMD, no matter how you slice it.

HardReset said:

Zen5 is much cheaper to manufacture than Zen4.

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Err, what? Zen5 moved from TSMC's N4P node to N4X (N3 for the "c" variant), and from N5 to N4 for CCDs. Only the I/O chiplet is unchanged at 6nm. Both these new nodes are more expensive than the preceeding one (though N4P to N4X is admittedly a minor bump.)

Zen 5 uses the same socket, so not sure why you even bring that up. And while AMD likely did save on "design costs" for Zen 5, you realize that doesn't affect manufacturing costs, right?

Endymio said:

Zen 5 uses the same socket, so not sure why you even bring that up. And while AMD likely did save on "design costs" for Zen 5, you realize that doesn't affect manufacturing costs, right?

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Much of the R&D costs of the new socket design needed to be absorbed in the first generation. While not huge, it's not zero. The real reason I think these chips will end up cheaper is that AMD is trying to push AI on their chips, the best way to get people to buy them is *drum roll* a price cut. I have a feeling that AMD has plans to monetize their local AI features.

I do think that we are reaching the tipping point of whether or not AI is going to sink or swim.

yRaz said:

Much of the R&D costs of the new socket design needed to be absorbed in the first generation.

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Sure. But saying "our R&D costs were low" is just another way of saying "we really didn't improve much". AMD's margins might improve slightly, but their total revenues are going to take a significant dip.

Endymio said:

Eh? You seem to be agreeing that Zen5 brings far less value to the table than its predecessor. And none of this changes the fact that when you reduce pricing 25% on equal volume, total revenue drops 25%. This isn't a positive for AMD, no matter how you slice it.

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If something is cheaper, then value is smaller? No wonder GPU prices are going up all the time. And if volume is greater, then what happens on revenue? It gets up of course.

Endymio said:

Err, what? Zen5 moved from TSMC's N4P node to N4X (N3 for the "c" variant), and from N5 to N4 for CCDs. Only the I/O chiplet is unchanged at 6nm. Both these new nodes are more expensive than the preceeding one (though N4P to N4X is admittedly a minor bump.)

Zen 5 uses the same socket, so not sure why you even bring that up. And while AMD likely did save on "design costs" for Zen 5, you realize that doesn't affect manufacturing costs, right?

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You sure they are actually more expensive? 5nm node was best one available on 2022. Now best available is expensive 3nm. Also 6nm is much older process now so it also should be cheaper.

In other words, 2022 Zen4 had quite new 6nm node and best available 5nm node. Now Zen5 has same 6nm but 2 years older and 4nm is not best available. Total cost should be lower but of course it's impossible to say how much AMD really pays.

Re-using same IO die of course lower manufacturing costs because they probably have some excess chips that were meant for Zen4 CPUs but will now be used on Zen5.

Endymio said:

Sure. But saying "our R&D costs were low" is just another way of saying "we really didn't improve much". AMD's margins might improve slightly, but their total revenues are going to take a significant dip.

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I didn't say they were low. Gonna from PGA to LGA is not cheap and LGA has a lot of downsides that don't get talked about. They went to LGA with Threadripper and it a lot of problems that the solution to was basically "repaste and reseat the CPU"

I'm not saying it was cheap, but they only predicted so many sales and needed to absorb that in the first generation of the socket. The cost of development ended up being about $50 a system. This was split between the a premium on the chipset and a premium on the cpus.

Puiu said:

"European prices are typically listed without the VAT" - ah... what? no they aren't. prices usually include VAT.

From the website's price and VAT policy: All prices include 22% VAT.

This means that the listed prices have a 22% included VAT, although I think the prices are too good to be true. We can see that the listings have a "20% discount if you buy online" already.

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TSMC's N4P is cheaper than th N5 at the time of Zen 4's release. The dies are a bit smaller and AMD looks like it wants to compete rather than gouge. Prices have been reported by a few leakers to be cheaper than Zen 4 and AMD won't be losing money unlike Intel does with it's much higher fabrication costs for Raptor Lake and Arrow Lake will be even more epensive. AMD knows this and Intel will be under enormous pressure to not raise prices.