They are definitely selling them at close to no profit, but they are not anywhere near subsidizing them unless they botched their supply chain so badly that they are overpaying the BOM costs.
I'm proud to support them. Intel is also selling their lunar lake chips fairly cheaply too. Let's all hope they make it through this rough patch. I can't imagine a world where we only have one x86 manufacturer.
R&D is a sunk cost that is largely paid by their iGPUs. Selling at cost is not a subsidy and that is not relevant here since they should be making money off every sale. I tried estimating their costs a few months ago and found that they had room for up to a 10% margin on these, even after giving retailers a 10% margin. If they are not making money from these, it would be their fault for not building enough to leverage economics of scale.
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Acer Arc A770 16gb GPU w/Free Game & Shipping $229.99
$229.99 $399.99 at Newegg
Sure that margin is holding when they had to mark the first generation down to get them off the shelves. It would truly surprise me if they've made a significant profit off these cards.
Server code tends to be extremely portable. Just recompile for the new architecture and you are done. The porting work for servers has already been done by the community. The main exception would be game servers, which are binary blobs, but box86/box64 can run those.
A number of businesses have switched to using arm EC2 servers from x86 EC2 servers for lower costs and things work fine on them.
Imagine if AMD never existed. Everything about owning a computer would be worse. Likewise now we need Intel ( or someone else, perhaps a Chinese OEM) to make competition.
