leoneazzurro
Golden Member
- Jul 26, 2016
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1. That beefed up AD106 would cost more(extra 25-30mm2 and 4GB Vram), true, but performance would be also better. Nvidia could ask more for It, which will naturally result in higher laptop price, which is bad, but still cheaper than RTX 4080 12GB and more future-proof than with only 8GB Vram.
2. As you said, the space is a problem. If they used HBM It would be resolved, but they keep using GDDR6. With HBM they wouldn't even need big L2 cache and memory PHY would be also smaller. Amount of Vram would also no longer be a problem.
3. Current AD106 is a "big die" paired with only 128-bit bus. It is already bottlenecked.
1. They are maximizing their profits, not doing favors to the users. These dies are made for a market range that is on the lower end, their reasoning is that if you need more FPS, you'll buy the higher end GPUs for bigger notebooks and pay more. Most of the laptop user do not even know a third of the technical details we are discussing here and in any case most people do not want to spend 2K$ or more on a mainstream laptop. Same reason for AMD going to produce N33 on N6 instead of N5 and even getting a smaller chip than the previous generation one. Margins and keeping costs low especially on lower end parts.
2. HBM on a mainstream product? Sure. There must be a reason it does not happen.
3. AD106 is not a big die in absolute terms, it is less than 200mm^2. And as such, even finding the space for the pins of a memory bus larger than 128 bit with a standard packaging is probably difficult.
In any case, the 4050/4060 and the 4080 mobile (especially the latter) seem to be the best deals, they offer better performance and perf/W than the older gen and will probably sold at the same price. 4080 Mobile could be my next GPU, it will depend on what N32 will be.
Edit: it is anyway a bit of scandal because looking at the prices on barebone laptops configurators the price of these mobile cards is quite high, on par with their desktop version while being considerably less powerful and even without the massive cooler of the desktop VGA. But alas, not that there is a choice there (maybe when N32 will arrive but I doubt it).
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