AMD Polaris Refresh? AMD "North Star" this year?

[asus killer]

AMD simplified the CPU's, but in respect to the GPU's they are taking a page of Intel management of CPU's. Really confusing lineup. 

 

Polaris, vega, navi, 7nm, 12nm, GDDR6, HBM2,...

 

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

The Kaby Lake-G design seems to have mostly been for Apple, but they stuffed it in some NUCs and it'll show up in some laptops. Fairly great for 2-in-1s.

 

The interesting question is if Intel will be releasing a Coffee Lake-G next year with the same GPU, as it's pretty likely Intel contracted those GPUs before Ryzen was known to be so good. Which is the only real reason we got those 6c designs.

In case you haven't seen it, this was the video I was watching and it was for a Dell XPS 15 2-in-1. Really nice looking laptop.

 

For a 2-in-1 unless you actually need really good graphics for some reason the Coffee Lake options really are better in that form factor. By the time there is a Coffee Lake-G or similar I think Nvidia will having something prepared and ready to counter where as now a 6 core Intel CPU + AMD GPU APU would very much hammer the traditional Intel + Nvidia laptops as you could common part design across so many different laptops and form factors without any real compromises. Seems like a home run hit that nicks the fence and falls ever so short.

[Taf the Ghost]

4 minutes ago, asus killer said:

AMD simplified the CPU's, but in respect to the GPU's they are taking a page of Intel management of CPU's. Really confusing lineup. 

 

Polaris, vega, navi, 7nm, 12nm, GDDR6, HBM2,...

 

It really gets worse.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris

 

Polaris is also known as the "North Star". So it's really Polaris Polaris.

[UFDisciple]

4 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

It really gets worse.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris

 

Polaris is also known as the "North Star". So it's really Polaris Polaris.

Vega is also sometimes our North Star.  Will be again in about 11,000 years. Vega is the future.

[Taf the Ghost]

3 minutes ago, UFDisciple said:

Vega is also sometimes our North Star.  Will be again in about 11,000 years. Vega is the future.

Star Drift. Things you don't expect to come up in GPU discussions.

 

Polaris is actually a 3-star system, so it's slightly smaller than AMD's Polaris IP bin.

[schwellmo92]

I’m calling bs, otherwise it would’ve been announced at Computex on their GPU roadmap.

[Taf the Ghost]

6 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

I’m calling bs, otherwise it would’ve been announced at Computex on their GPU roadmap.

Could be, we'll know more soon enough, though PcPer dropped the "North Star" name. That seems to imply there's something to this.

[Dylanc1500]

1 hour ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Star Drift. Things you don't expect to come up in GPU discussions.

 

Polaris is actually a 3-star system, so it's slightly smaller than AMD's Polaris IP bin.

@UFDisciple

Don't forget Navi, it's a sub-giant, B(e) class, star that's near the end of its life. Currently it's in the stage of turning into a giant and exhausting it's supply of hydrogen, then expand and get really hot. At the point it does, it will collapse in upon itself.

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, Dylanc1500 said:

Don't forget Navi, it's a sub-giant, B(e) class, star that's near the end of its life. Currently it's in the stage of turning into a giant and exhausting it's supply of hydrogen and will expand and get really hot. At the point it does, it will collapse in upon itself.

So the life cycle of all current AMD GPUs 

[Dylanc1500]

14 minutes ago, leadeater said:

So the life cycle of all current AMD GPUs 

Precisely, it'll all end in a black hole, neutron star or a black dwarf.

 

Hopefully they go supernova. It'll be spectacular....

[S w a t s o n]

Jesus christ, so AMD is going to be selling Polaris 30, Vega 7nm (Lisa Su did say it was coming to gamers), and Navi (GD6 and HBM2) at the same time? Unless Vega 7nm comes and goes before Navi HBM2?

[Trixanity]

1 hour ago, Swatson said:

Vega 7nm (Lisa Su did say it was coming to gamers)

She did not say that. She said 7nm would be coming to gamers. That's so vague that it's pretty much guaranteed to be Navi until further notice.

Meaning if Vega 7nm yields are excellent it may see an expanded launch beyond HPC.

[Humbug]

48 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

She did not say that. She said 7nm would be coming to gamers. That's so vague that it's pretty much guaranteed to be Navi until further notice.

Meaning if Vega 7nm yields are excellent it may see an expanded launch beyond HPC.

I bet that at the start 7nm yields will not be high enough to justify making gaming GPUs. Probably be lots of defective dies and small quantities of good silicon so AMD knows that the way to make money off it is by selling at high prices to the data center market. By the time Navi is ready the yields will be good enough that they can afford to sell in larger quantities to gamers where the price has to be competitive with Nvidia.

[Doobeedoo]

Seems a bit of a mess though.

Another Polaris refresh on 12nm node with 20% performance uplift. Rumored 7nm Vega 35% performance increase presumably and Navi being release first as lower tier with GDDR6 and later as higher end one with HBM2 huh. So yeah...

[Stefan Payne]

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

Seems a bit of a mess though.

Another Polaris refresh on 12nm node with 20% performance uplift.

possibly 20% higher clock rate. Not 20% higher Performance.

But its possible they might also increase the Memory Clock 10-12,5%

 

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

Rumored 7nm Vega 35% performance increase presumably

No

It has ~double the Bandwith.

The Rest stays about the same.

How much more Performance that will bring, we don't know.

There might also some other minor changes as well, but from a gamer perspective most of the things stay the same...

Also the Clockrate might rise noticably...

 

2 hours ago, Humbug said:

I bet that at the start 7nm yields will not be high enough to justify making gaming GPUs. 

7nm probably won't be the Problem.

4x HBM is...

That said, its possible that they silently replace VEGA 10 with VEGA 20 for various reasons, but stick with the 2048bit Memory Interface.

 

7 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

I’m calling bs, otherwise it would’ve been announced at Computex on their GPU roadmap.

No, why should it??

Because it might be a recent change and they weren't sure at the time for whatever reason.

 

Just look at what they say to Ryzen 14nm -> 12nm.

They say that they can use the same tools and so on so Ryzen+ (2000 series) is more or less a new stepping on the same process. No redesign required.

So its not really a DIE Shrink but rather an improved version of the 14nm process. That said, they might have thought that its not worth mentioning as its just e new revision/stepping of Polaris with a bit higher clock rate. 
Its still the same chip, same die size, same everything.

 

 

 

 

[S w a t s o n]

3 hours ago, Trixanity said:

She did not say that. She said 7nm would be coming to gamers. That's so vague that it's pretty much guaranteed to be Navi until further notice.

Meaning if Vega 7nm yields are excellent it may see an expanded launch beyond HPC.

No she was holding up vega 7nm and said "we're bringing it to gamers"

Did you think anyone had a doubt that an entire MAJOR node would come to gamers? AFAIK Navi was ALWAYS planned to be 7nm

[Trixanity]

16 minutes ago, Swatson said:

No she was holding up vega 7nm and said "we're bringing it to gamers"

Did you think anyone had a doubt that an entire MAJOR node would come to gamers?

You just made me go back and re-watch the conference... And you're still wrong.

She said "We're definitely bringing 7nm GPUs to gaming as well so stay tuned on that". It's even plural and she never said 'it' while waving the GPU around. She was referencing other products. In fact, she seemed intent on trying to appease gamers in the wake of the fact that this GPU she's holding up isn't coming to them. Her language tried to dissuade anyone of having the idea of it coming to gamers (except it didn't work apparently). It's possible that Vega may come but we're looking at a few things for that to happen: Navi need to launch late 2019 and the yields need to be good enough for it to make sense to bring it down to consumers and possibly being pressured by Nvidia's Turing launch. Any Vega 7nm consumer GPU would launch in Q2 at the earliest making it a tight fit considering Navi. Either way: Vega was and is a failure as a consumer GPU and it makes little sense to bring it to market beyond having a big stockpile they can't sell to HPC clients. They'd rather sell those GPUs for $3000 than $700.

 

As for doubt: not really but you do know that these conferences contain 90% fluff that everyone already knows, right? They need to reaffirm their roadmaps for investors' sake more than anything else.

 

On the bright side: their new GPU lead intends to launch new GPUs on a yearly basis over the next three years. However the language there, too, is vague so we may end up disappointed by what a yearly cadence means.

[S w a t s o n]

1 minute ago, Trixanity said:

You just made me go back and re-watch the conference... And you're still wrong.

She said "We're definitely bringing 7nm GPUs to gaming as well so stay tuned on that". It's even plural and she never said 'it' while waving the GPU around. She was referencing other products. In fact, she seemed intent on trying to appease gamers in the wake of the fact that this GPU she's holding up isn't coming to them. Her language tried to dissuade anyone of having the idea of it coming to gamers (except it didn't work apparently).

No, just no. You're making assumptions based on your argument. Her language did nothing of the sort to "dissaude" or 'appease" anyone

[Trixanity]

1 minute ago, Swatson said:

No, just no. You're making assumptions based on your argument. Her language did nothing of the sort to "dissaude" or 'appease" anyone

If it makes you feel any better: most outlets I've seen have come to the same conclusion as I have. Her language wasn't inclusive of the chip she was holding. You're making the assumptions in fact. She made no attempt to say it was coming to consumers. It would be presumptuous to think it does.

 

The Vega 7nm chip is a product with a limited scope either way, so your scenario doesn't make sense right now. It may later but there is no intention to launch for consumers as we speak.

[S w a t s o n]

19 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

If it makes you feel any better: most outlets I've seen have come to the same conclusion as I have. Her language wasn't inclusive of the chip she was holding. You're making the assumptions in fact. She made no attempt to say it was coming to consumers. It would be presumptuous to think it does.

 

The Vega 7nm chip is a product with a limited scope either way, so your scenario doesn't make sense right now. It may later but there is no intention to launch for consumers as we speak.

No they haven't? (Should clarify I mean post-computex, we all know that 7nm was originally rumored for radeon instinct months ago)
 

The entire time they are talking about 7nm, as a whole not vega, because vega is old news. BUT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT VEGA 7NM, she's holding vega 7nm. She says we'll bring 7nm to gamers, but the entire time they are talking about vega 7nm they just say 7nm. It is true that she does not say vega outright but given the CONTEXT of the previous comments.

At like 1:29:05 she goes on to say "David showed you 7nm in action, i'm going to show you the 7nm chip", no mention of vega. But she is showing us vega 7nm, then she makes the comment about bringing 7nm gpu to gamers.

 

 

Edit: Here are 2 publications referencing a chiphell (sometimes accurate) leak saying vega 20 on 7nm is a thing for gaming. Of course these are rumors but we wont get anything better until amd is ready for the announcment.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/62386/amd-rumors-vega-20-7nm-16gb-hbm2-gamers-q1-2019/index.html
https://wccftech.com/amd-gpu-rumors-12nm-polaris-30-7nm-navi-7nm-vega-20-radeon-rx-gaming/

[YoloSwag]

Polaris refresh(???)

 

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those chips are just overclocked or slightly modified RX 480/580 chips that they had to re-release/repackage because they banked heavily on the mining craze and what happened with them was the same with Nvidia's overstocking problem.

[Trixanity]

28 minutes ago, Swatson said:

No they haven't? (Should clarify I mean post-computex, we all know that 7nm was originally rumored for radeon instinct months ago)
 

The entire time they are talking about 7nm, as a whole not vega, because vega is old news. BUT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT VEGA 7NM, she's holding vega 7nm. She says we'll bring 7nm to gamers, but the entire time they are talking about vega 7nm they just say 7nm. It is true that she does not say vega outright but given the CONTEXT of the previous comments.

At like 1:29:05 she goes on to say "David showed you 7nm in action, i'm going to show you the 7nm chip", no mention of vega. But she is showing us vega 7nm, then she makes the comment about bringing 7nm gpu to gamers.

 

 

Edit: Here are 2 publications referencing a chiphell (sometimes accurate) leak saying vega 20 on 7nm is a thing for gaming. Of course these are rumors but we wont get anything better until amd is ready for the announcment.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/62386/amd-rumors-vega-20-7nm-16gb-hbm2-gamers-q1-2019/index.html
https://wccftech.com/amd-gpu-

Quote

rumors

-12nm-polaris-30-7nm-navi-7nm-vega-20-radeon-rx-gaming/

Because it's related to 7nm...  Besides, she needed to show a physical chip because people have been cheated by demos or props before. 

Codenames like that don't reveal their target audience. I don't think we've seen any segmentation of codenames for consumer/enterprise markets by AMD yet. They may have different part numbers but those are vastly different.

 

Anandtech: 

Quote

Finally, Lisa Su also quickly reiterated that the rest of AMD's GPU roadmap hasn't changed from earlier this year. This means that after the 7nm Vega GPU for compute users, AMD will be bringing 7nm GPUs out to gamers & other consumers as well in the form of Navi. AMD has not announced a timeframe for this, but we're certainly not expecting this until sometime in 2019.

Tom's Hardware:

Quote

but Su assured the crowd that the company plans to bring the new process to consumer GPUs in the future. Su didn't specify if the new gaming graphics card would feature the Vega architecture, but we expect it to come with the next-gen Navi architecture.

Notebookcheck:

Quote

The prototype 7nm Vega Radeon Instinct accelerator card sports 32 GB of HBM2 memory. While AMD did not divulge the specs of the card, from what we know so far, the card could feature a 4096-bit bus. The launch timelines for the new Radeon Instinct accelerator cards are pretty aggressive. AMD has started to sample these cards with select customers already and looks to make them available for production by 2H 2018. The benefits of the 7nm process will soon be translated into the consumer gaming segment with the release of 'Navi' scheduled to be sometime in 2019. 

Wccftech:

Quote

So 7nm Radeon RX is definitely coming to gamers, but it would be based on Navi meaning that AMD has not changed their roadmap and are sticking to it. There are some obvious benefits of the latest 7nm Vega GPU such as faster clocks, higher capacity memory and smaller die size making cards more efficient, but the design itself may not make much sense for the gaming community. 

 

Anyway. They've added a bunch of ML specific stuff to the die according to various leaks but AMD hasn't been forthcoming with details. However, it wouldn't provide any meaningful upgrade to consumers beside clock speeds and would be a waste of money. Their roadmap says Navi is the next 7nm for consumers. If Vega were to come to consumers it would have to be a different GPU... which would funnily enough still make it different than the one she was holding. Which coincidentally would still make you wrong.

 

The thing is: Vega as a high performance GPU for consumers is pretty terrible. The process won't really change that. It will make it a slightly better but given the baseline it's a useless gesture. At best we'll see an expensive card that reaches a 1080 Ti but we'll already get a GTX 1180 that exceeds that soon so it'll be a futile effort.

 

You don't launch useless expensive products unless you're desperate so if your point is that AMD is so desperate they'll launch anything they have on hand whether it makes sense or not, then sure. But until then it's fanciful thinking on your part.

[Doobeedoo]

1 hour ago, Stefan Payne said:

possibly 20% higher clock rate. Not 20% higher Performance.

But its possible they might also increase the Memory Clock 10-12,5%

 

No

It has ~double the Bandwith.

The Rest stays about the same.

How much more Performance that will bring, we don't know.

There might also some other minor changes as well, but from a gamer perspective most of the things stay the same...

Also the Clockrate might rise noticably...

Yeah I guess, seems more probably though. We'll see how much these are better. But really the next flagship successor is what's the most awaited.

[S w a t s o n]

15 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Because it's related to 7nm...  Besides, she needed to show a physical chip because people have been cheated by demos or props before. 

Codenames like that don't reveal their target audience. I don't think we've seen any segmentation of codenames for consumer/enterprise markets by AMD yet. They may have different part numbers but those are vastly different.

 

Anandtech: 

Tom's Hardware:

Notebookcheck:

Wccftech:

The thing is: Vega as a high performance GPU for consumers is pretty terrible. The process won't really change that. It will make it a slightly better but given the baseline it's a useless gesture. At best we'll see an expensive card that reaches a 1080 Ti but we'll already get a GTX 1180 that exceeds that soon so it'll be a futile effort.

 

 

Anandtech:
"Roadmap hasn't changed" /=/ no vega 7nm for gamers. Vega 7nm was never broken down into compute vs gaming on actual roadmaps, and the roadmaps said 12nm until recently.

 

Tom's Hardware:

" Su didn't specify if the new gaming graphics card would feature the Vega architecture, but we expect it to come with the next-gen Navi architecture." So because she didnt say "vega" a writer at tom's hardware assumed navi because that's what he heard before, no actual reason.

Notebookcheck:

Again, we know for sure instinct is coming and that navi 7nm is coming. They are repeating the computex announcement and roadmap basically. Confirms that Vega 7nm will be in production this year which actually supports the idea of vega 20 on 7nm in 1h 2019.

 

Wccftech: First of all, I linked to WCCFtech saying 7nm on vega  for gaming is a thing. Can you link the exact article? When was it published?

 

Vega will benefit massively from a node shrink from 14nm to 7nm because of power consumption and voltage leakage which is actually one of the main factors holding vega back, and 7nm yields are supposed to be amazing for a brand new lithography. I fully expect them to push vega nano if 7nm does come to gamers.

I'm guessing AMD planned Radeon Instinct to be 7nm only because they didnt expect yields to be high enough for commerical viability of lower margin consumer parts. Then they got 7nm initials yields and realized it was viable. Remember that Navi is expect in late 2019, that is enough time to run a refresh at 7nm until then. AMD seems to be on the 7nm hype train and from what I've heard in general TSMC's 7nm is basically godly.

 

 

[Trixanity]

8 minutes ago, Swatson said:

Anandtech:
"Roadmap hasn't changed" /=/ no vega 7nm for gamers. Vega 7nm was never broken down into compute vs gaming on actual roadmaps, and the roadmaps said 12nm until recently.

 

Tom's Hardware:

" Su didn't specify if the new gaming graphics card would feature the Vega architecture, but we expect it to come with the next-gen Navi architecture." So because she didnt say "vega" a writer at tom's hardware assumed navi because that's what he heard before, no actual reason.

Notebookcheck:

Again, we know for sure instinct is coming and that navi 7nm is coming. They are repeating the computex announcement and roadmap basically. Confirms that Vega 7nm will be in production this year which actually supports the idea of vega 20 on 7nm in 1h 2019.

 

Wccftech: First of all, I linked to WCCFtech saying 7nm on vega  for gaming is a thing. Can you link the exact article? When was it published?

 

Vega will benefit massively from a node shrink from 14nm to 7nm because of power consumption and voltage leakage which is actually one of the main factors holding vega back, and 7nm yields are supposed to be amazing for a brand new lithography. I fully expect them to push vega nano if 7nm does come to gamers.

I'm guessing AMD planned Radeon Instinct to be 7nm only because they didnt expect yields to be high enough for commerical viability of lower margin consumer parts. Then they got 7nm initials yields and realized it was viable. Remember that Navi is expect in late 2019, that is enough time to run a refresh at 7nm until then. AMD seems to be on the 7nm hype train and from what I've heard in general TSMC's 7nm is basically godly.

 

 

It benefits but so would any chip. Vega just isn't a gaming chip. It's pretty weak in that regard. It's unfixable without major changes. Hell, even Navi may prove to be just as bad. 2020 is where the real deal is.

 

But that's beside the original point which was: Lisa Su has not said that Vega 7nm will come to consumers. That remains true.

Is it possible things are going on behind the scenes? Sure, maybe. Officially: no.