People have stopped bothering to argue with you on this since you are making up straw-man arguments. In your mind, AMD is giving up on single thread performance if they don’t or can’t release a 288 MB L3 cache variant for the consumer market? No one said or implied that other than you. I personally think they will do fine with 96 MB.
I think otherwise. I think that 96 MB is not going to be enough against Alder Lake in single thread, so perhaps that difference is what is leading us to a different conclusions.
A larger cache variant Ryzen part would break market segmentation and doesn’t have any place in the stack. What would it be priced at vs. threadripper 5000 parts that could have high cache per core size without X3D?
I think gaming is being taken more seriously in 2021, as a market segment, more than ever. Look at NVidia market cap. While it may be miners, but these are theoretically gaming cards that were > 3 billion in revenue last quarter. It was not long ago when the entire quarterly revenue of AMD was < 3 billion per quarter. Gaming cards for NVIdia generate > 3/4 of the entire AMD revenue that spans datacenter, client, console
Half of NVDA revenue is from gaming. NVDA market cap is nearly 4x AMD.
The gaming market dwarfs Threadripper / workstation. I have not seen any market research on this TAM, but it is so small it would probably be an asterisk on any presentation analyzing workstation related TAM vs. other segments.
Making AMD market segmentation subservient to an asterisk would not be the best approach. Instead, AMD should be figuring out how to make Threadripper a worthwhile segment, rather than it being a roadblock to sound decision making.
Overall, my pricing suggestions would be after X3D release would be:
Zen 3: Down (it is already heavily discounted)
Zen X3D 1 stack: Same as old Zen 3
Zen x3D >1 stack: Up (higher than current Zen 3)
Threadripper: Down a lot, no 3D cache, just a lot of threads)
Threadripper Pro: maintain current prices, add 3D cache. Alternatively, release lower core counts (8, 16) with highest V-Cache. and scrap Zen X3D with > 1 stack.
Anyway, it likely isn’t relevant since the more than 1 layer device probably isn’t going to be available in the same time frame. I know people trying to get Milan processors at the moment and they can’t get them. This is very bad in the server market when a company specs a machine, gets evaluation machines, and then can’t actually get the parts to build the production machines. Perhaps covid is to blame for the delays; I don’t know.
AMD can aim for certain breakdown between client and server, and still miss. It seems AMD put a lot into client CPU pipeline, pretty much saturating the market, and maybe got swamped with orders from hyperscalers later. Google, skipping Ice Lake, seems particularly gung ho on EPYC.
Threadripper 5000 isn’t going to be available until AMD can mostly satisfy Milan demand. Current rumors say threadripper 5000 availability will not be until November now. Milan-X3D (presumably 4+ layer devices) is rumored to not be available until sometime in 2022.
Threadripper is the last priority. Again, asterisk vs. 30-40 billion server market.
So, I guess from what you seem to believe, AMD is just completely SOL, since they are probably only going to have 96 MB L3 parts in the consumer market at the end of the year.
It has happened frequently that people in forums try to build up unreasonable expectations for upcoming AMD parts. I don’t know if this is just fanboyism or an attempt to make truly incredible AMD releases seem more like a disappointment. I am wondering which category you fall into.
I think AMD should attempt to take CPU for gaming in same direction NVDA took GPU for gaming.
Sometimes, it is hard to tell between reality and confirmation bias, but what I am seeing is that AMD is going to go for it. Not sufficiently squashing Alder Lake would either end this ambition or put it on an indefinite pause.