It was 100% clear to me that 7900XT was priced to sell 7900XTXs. It was done so AMD did not have to cut perfectly good dies at launch so they dampened demand with poor pricing. Now that the $1,000 tier is saturated (as seen by the fact stock is pretty easy to come by) the 7900XT price can drop down to be positioned more in line with the relative performance if not better . In the UK an MBA 7900XT can be had for £750 and the cheapest 7900XTX is £1,050 making the 7900XT a pretty compelling part if you want to spend that kind of money on a GPU.
Proposed price tiers.
Again, comparing to RDNA2 where AMD were positioning the 6800XT at $649 as the sweetspot, they were likely plenty willing to cut down good dies for that pricing. Even a new "street" price of $800 for a 7900XT would still be a significant pricing increase gen-on-gen.
| GPU | Proposed Price | Performance | Die Size | Replaces | Old MSRP | Current price | Old Die Size |
|---|
| 7800XT | $600 | ~6950XT | 200mm N5 + 4x36mm N6 = 344mm | 6800XT | $650 | $510 | 520mm N7 |
| 7700XT | $500 | ~6800XT | 200mm N5 + 4x36mm N6 = 344mm | 6700XT | $480 | $400 (6750XT) | 335mm N7 |
| 7600XT | $400 | ~6800 | 200mm N5 + 3x36 N6 = 308mm | 6600XT | $380 | $300 (6650XT) | 237mm N7 |
| 7500XT | $300 | ~6700 | 200mm N6 | 6500XT | $200 | $160 | 107mm N7 |
Margins on the 7800XT would be better than the 6800XT. I think margins on the 7700XT would be pretty close to those on the 6700XT and the margins on the 7600XT and 7500XT would be worse than the MRSP of the 6600XT and 6500XT but both of those had horrible MSRPs. With the current pricing in mind the $300 7500XT would be slightly better perf/$ than the currently available 6650XT. The $400 7600XT would be slightly better perf/% than the currently available $400 6750XT and the $500 7700XT would be about the same as the currently available 6800XT.
Proposals:
- 7800XT vs 6800XT at launch: Possibly, although that would heavily depend on the tradeoff between chiplet packaging + N5 vs a larger monolithic N7
- 7700XT vs 6700XT at launch: Absolutely not, N5+N6 with roughly equivalent die size in 2023 is more expensive than N7 in 2020, not to mention chiplet packaging costs, more GDDR6 VRAM,
- 7600XT vs 6600XT at launch: Setting aside that it is unlikely for N32 to have 3 cuts when the bigger N31 only has 2 for consumer at the moment, unless there are big problems with yields at N5 (there shouldn;t be), even a heavily binned N32 will have significantly thinner margins than N23 at similar pricing.
- 7500XT vs 6500XT: Same here, double the die space, vram...does not make for good margins, even if we're assuming a $100 increase in MSRP.
Keep in mind that R&D costs in the development period for RDNA3 (~2019-22) is way more expensive than RDNA 2 (~2016-19), on account of the massively increased personnel costs that every single U.S tech company faced during the COVID years as they outbid each other for talent. AMD's SG&A costs jumped from $995m in 2020 to $2.3B in 2022 for example, all these additional costs need to get amortized.
AMD have an opportunity to really steal some of that mindshare if they spec and price their parts correctly and I think the above does that. That 7600XT with 12GB of VRAM vs the $400 4060(Ti) with 8GB would be a great selling point. The 16GB 7700XT at $500 vs the similar performing $600 4070 would also get people to move to AMD and then the same priced 7800XT with performance that knocks on the door of the $800 4070Ti would also be something worth considering for a lot of people.
Do that and announce the new 7900XT MSRP to be $750 and AMD solid stack that would sell well IMO.
It's been nearly six months since RDNA3 has launched and so far we still don't have much in the way of official information, let alone products for RDNA3 GPUs other than N31, this doesn't strike me as a company that wants to get attention and marketshare. Frankly speaking, I don't think they care about mindshare and would be plenty happy taking those wafers and making datacenter GPUs/CPUs instead..