> Unfortunately the BoM on these things is probably super high.,, even for a datacenter GPU
You would save money on improved yields of chiplets and on using cheaper nodes where appropriate. I imagine that would help offset the increased packaging costs.
However, they are moving to compete in a market where the profit margins are so obscene that a small increase in the cost of materials really wouldn't be an important factor.
> Nvidia Makes Nearly 1,000% Profit on H100 GPUs: Report
And that's the consequence of giving the market leader a decade and a half head start. No one and I mean no one was preventing AMD or Intel from building a competitive hardware and software ecosystem other than themselves.
It was a David against two Goliaths situation until recently.
Five years ago when AMD was recovering from near bankruptcy, it was battling Intel (100K+engineers) in CPUs and Nvidia (20K+ engineers) in GPUs
It was doing that with just 10K engineers and a fraction of the R&D budget of the giants.
Things have changed now. AMD has more than doubled their headcount and R&D budgets.
Within the last year the company has pivoted to AI as their main focus.
In the case of AI computing, my layman's perspective of the last decade is that NVIDIA created a market where one did not previously exist "at scale" as a long bet that is paying off significantly.
It seems unfair to criticize AMD or Intel for placing losing bets on other market segments when things could have just as easily turned out differently.
It could be argued that Nvidia sabotaged OpenCL. Part of the reason that nobody used OpenCL was because that it didn't work very well on Nvidia hardware, which was the dominant hardware. So unseating Nvidia was an impossible chicken/egg problem. To unseat Nvidia you needed OpenCL to succeed but OpenCL couldn't succeed without good support Nvidia.
OpenCL sucked for other reasons too, but it likely wouldn't have succeeded even if it didn't suck.
That'd be a tough argument. Intel and AMD aren't responding to CUDA by pumping resources into OpenCL, they're building completely new libraries. That suggests NVidia was frustrated by its partners in the OpenCL design process and just built their own system that worked.
Yeah, NVIDIA was frustrated by disabling memory channels (3 concurrent transfers for CUDA, 1 for OpenCL) and not providing real support while advertising support for newer OpenCL versions (builds failing with cryptic compile errors). Causing OpenCL code to perform poorly and preventing it from running on their own hardware in some cases.
Other than locking out the technologies they see threatening, they’re completely a fair company, if you want to believe in that.
Yeah, I can't reasonably buy one. But rent one to do some maths? Good odds.
There are some existing APU systems - I use low wattage ones as thin clients. Currently thinking it should be possible to write code that runs slowly on a cheap APU and dramatically faster on a MI300A system. Debug locally, batch compute on AWS (or wherever ends up hosting these things).
Bill of Materials should really only be used for things that require a list of items/labor, and aren't sold individually such as a datacenter, a building, a hardware integration project, a wedding, etc. For things that are sold individually, "cost" will suffice, and BoM is an example of incorrectly using a more complicated term for the sake of seeming smart.
As a shorthand for expected retail cost, that is terribly misapplied. Or even for internal cost.
The chip would be one line item on the BOM for the entire thing you plan on shipping (but not packaged yet). Even in the case you are "just" selling a chip, the BOM is likely more complicated,and in this context primarily the manufacturing side cares about that. The COGS (cost of goods sold) is something the company as a whole will care more about - this is what it actually costs you to get it out the door. You will hear "BOM cost" referring to the elemental cost of one item on the BOM, but that's not the BOM itself.
None of these are related to the retail (or wholesale) cost in a simple way, either than forming a floors on long term sustainable price.
The GGG-whatever post is using this sloppily to suggest that the chips are going to be very expensive to produce, therefore the product is going to be expensive.
You'll also see BOM in a materials and labor type invoice, (like when you get your car serviced) but that's not relevant here.
What I really meant was total production cost + reasonable amortization cost for the development/tape out, which is of course is huge even if this chip was mass produced.
The point kinda stands though, this thing is collectively way too hard to fab + assemble to sell to consumers at any reasonable cost, especially on top of the massive R&D AMD, TSMC and everyone along the huge chain put into it.
Its not like a 4090 or Apple Silicon where the production is reasonably cheap, but margins are super high because they can be super high.
AMD is coming out with a "strix halo" APU somewhat appropriate for compute.
https://hothardware.com/news/amd-strix-halo-cpu-rumors