Stefan Mileschin

Bill of Materials

Our original article about the HBM 2 cost gained a lot of traction and we decided to try to dig out how much the whole card BOM (bill of materials) might be.

Bear in mind that we are working with estimates that, based on our investigations, might be close to the actual bill or materials. The BOM number we dug out spans between $650 and $700. AMD confirmed at its CES press event that the Radeon VII price sits at $699 which makes it impossible to make any meaningful money on the card. Radeon VII is about showing that AMD is still playing in the high end more than an actually economically viable solution.

One thing that we learned in following AMD for more than two decades, AMD was never about making money on every single product, it was more a company which wanted to gain market share and then slowly gain meaningful margins.
HBM 2 $320

As previously stated, the HBM 2 memory is the most expensive part of the card as it costs as much as $320 per card. Assuming that the $650 is the BOM number, the memory costs almost half of the whole card. Having a card with 8GB would significantly reduce the bill of material cost, but it would involve new engineering costs to design such a card and AMD would have to repackage the Vega 20 and create a package with 8GB (2x4GB HBM2) chips instead of the existing 4x4GB HBM2. When AMD sells Instinct MI50 / Mi60 card for $8,000 to $10,000 there is plenty of margin to make on the card, but the company knows that not too many people will buy an AI card. This is a totally different market compared to gamers. The memory spending is hard to justify for the gaming card.

https://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/4...ction-cost-650