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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

AMD ships primarily low and mid range cards, NVIDIA has an effective "monopoly" in the enthusiast market share which has the highest profit margins by far.

That said AMD hasn't managed to ship a 350-400$+ card that's worth spending money on compared to the competition since probably the 7950...

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That's a ridiculous definition of a monopoly. Using that methodology, you can claim any company has a monopoly that happens to have the best performing thing at the time.

Nobody is claiming Tesla has a monopoly on electric cars because they make the best. And nobody should claim Nvidia has a monopoly on GPUs since they are on top.

I didn't claim they had a monopoly, I said they had an "effective monopoly" in only one, albit very critical market segment, in which they ship over 75% of the hardware.

Regarding the effective monopoly on high end, this will change next month with release of Vega card.

I wouldn't hold my breath, the 1080 TI is coming out and NVIDIA would just drop the price on the 1080, they've done pretty much exactly the same thing with the Fury.

And AMD will have again a very expensive card to manufacture GDDR5/5x vs HBM2 with high power consumption based on the fact that the RX480 draws nearly as much power as a 1080 atm, and HBM2 isn't exactly power efficient (unlike HBM1 vs GDDR5), HBM2 is nice but the power requirement currently increase with the density, and it leaks voltage pretty badly with 4 stacks...

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