> Why don't you take a crack at your own question? There has to be a logical business reason right?
Selling 30M GPUs with a huge margin is more profitable than selling 60M GPUs with a modest margin, and they can point to Bitcoin or AI as an excuse.
But also, we're talking about them crippling the cards "for gamers" so there will be cards "for gamers" -- the premise of this has to be that they're supply constrained (artificially or otherwise) because otherwise they would just make more at the evidently profitable price gamers are already paying. It can't be a lack of demand because the purpose of removing the feature is to suppress demand (and shift it to more expensive cards).
> One is a commodity. The other is about as high tech as it gets. Completely different economic rules that govern these products.
So you're saying that if a high tech product only has a limited number of suppliers then they could charge high margins even if customers are price sensitive.
> One has an entire board that needs soldering, assembled by a manufacturing line, tested, with many parts, and a team of dedicated engineers optimizing drivers constantly. The other is a CPU that is machine tested, and shipped with a heatsink fan unattached. Come on now.
GPU manufacturing is automated. The CPU heatsink isn't attached because it mounts to the system board, not because attaching it would meaningfully affect the unit price.
Driver development isn't part of the unit cost, its contribution per unit goes down when you ship more units.
You can buy an entire GPU for the price difference between the 8500G and the RTX 4060.
> That's not true. The discrete GPU market has been shrinking for 14 years straight with some crypto boom years here and there. See the chart I posted previously.
That's only because you're limiting things to discrete GPUs and customers have increasingly been purchasing GPUs in other form factors (consoles, laptops, iGPUs) which have different attachment methods but are based on the same technology.
> According to Steam charts, Nvidia still dominates midrange cards.
Steam is measuring installed base. That changes slowly, especially when prices are high.
> Furthermore, when I said "feast", I meant making profits. AMD does not make much profit from midrange or low end cards.
They make a non-zero amount of profit, which is why they do it.