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

[S w a t s o n]

1 minute ago, Trixanity said:

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.

This entire thread is about rumored upcoming parts such as polaris 30, nothing is official...

[Trixanity]

4 minutes ago, Swatson said:

This entire thread is about rumored upcoming parts such as polaris 30, nothing is official...

That's true but your claim was still wrong. That's the core of this whole debate.

[S w a t s o n]

13 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

That's true but your claim was still wrong. That's the core of this whole debate.

No if you go back and read I made a statement regarding multiple products, NONE OF WHICH ARE OFFICIAL.

Vega 7nm on gaming, not official
Polaris 30 not official
Navi G6 not official

Navi HBM2 not technically official but lets be real.

 

We can disagree on whether or not Lisa meant Vega 7nm but I didn't say "Lisa Su literally spoke the words 'Vega on 7nm is coming to gamers'". My comprehension of what she said translates to that, your comprehension of what she said disagrees.

There's no real claim here other than I interpret what she said to mean 7nm vega and you don't

[jasonc_01]

AMD you say? New graphics cards you say? A refresh you say? 

 

 

WHO CARES until AMD have a NEW graphics product that isn't a generation behind Nvidias graphics performance, if not farther.  Seems like AMD is always trying to best Nvidias current king of the mountain at the end of its life cycle, just to have them drop next gen and laugh. Sad really, would love for AMD to bring competition back to the graphics market but i think at this rate Intel will be the one to do it.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Swatson said:

We can disagree on whether or not Lisa meant Vega 7nm but I didn't say "Lisa Su literally spoke the words 'Vega on 7nm is coming to gamers'". My comprehension of what she said translates to that, your comprehension of what she said disagrees.

It's usually best not to read more in to what someone like a CEO says. When they hold up a product and talk specifically about it in full i.e Vega 7nm professional cards and then at the end only mention 7nm will come to gamers with no mention of which actual architecture it's best not to assume it's the same as said previous shown product otherwise it would have been said so.

 

I like to take the "if it's not specifically said then there is more to it" approach with these types of people as they are very careful with their wording.

[Stefan Payne]

4 hours 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? AFAIK Navi was ALWAYS planned to be 7nm

Yes, they will bring 7nm to gamers.

No, it is not known if that applies to VEGA 20, because that depends on many points.

Mostly how good/reliable the manufacturing and prices of HBM2 will be at the time of release.

 

If the cost of that is too high, we will never see VEGA 20 as Gamers. At least not with 4 Stacks. With 2 its more likely, though you will loose performance because of half the Bandwith...

 

I don't know, I don't really see VEGA 20 in Desktop, especially with the next generation of the others on the doorstep...

 

Because at the time, it makes little sense to offer that for 800€ or more...

3 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

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.

But to be honest, if I start to think about it a bit more, It might be likely, that they just don't announce it and just switch Polaris 14nm with Polaris 12nm and just increase the efficiency.

 

Because there isn't that much gained with +10 or 15% higher performance but 30% lower power consumption.

The first e see those chips might be in Notebooks...

 

And also it depends on the price GF can give AMD for that chip. It might be possible that they can get a very nice Price for the new Chip for various reasons and thus can lower the cost as well. So I'm beginning to see a Polaris 10 based card with about the same clocks, maybe 6 or 8gbps Memory at around 1250MHz and 200€ or lower.

[S w a t s o n]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

It's usually best not to read more in to what someone like a CEO says. When they hold up a product and talk specifically about it in full i.e Vega 7nm professional cards and then at the end only mention 7nm will come to gamers with no mention of which actual architecture it's best not to assume it's the same as said previous shown product otherwise it would have been said so.

 

I like to take the "if it's not specifically said then there is more to it" approach with these types of people as they are very careful with their wording.

You're giving me basically your opinion on how to read between the lines or rather not to. I'm not  just reading between the lines of the computex conference and I have never claimed that it's 100% going to happen. There's been lots of speculation and rumor of vega 7nm on gaming cards. I made my opinion clear that lisa said vega 7nm is coming to gamers to try to avoid everyone being like "LOL NO ITS NOT CONFIRMED Y U SAY DAT"

If Lisa had said vega 7nm was coming to gamers, not only would it then actually be offical but this argument wouldnt even be a thing.

Here's the post that started this whole thing.

10 hours ago, Swatson said:

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?

Now this entire statement is about unconfirmed products and based on rumor. Do you see why it's obtuse to assume I am saying Lisa Su announced Vega 7nm for gamers at computex? It would be a confirmed product and this argument could therefore not even exist. You are all taking my read of lisa su given the context and rumors we've been reading, and ripping it out of it's context and saying 'but that's not literally true". Neither is any of that entire post. Pls just stahp.

1 hour ago, Stefan Payne said:

Yes, they will bring 7nm to gamers.

No, it is not known if that applies to VEGA 20, because that depends on many points.

Mostly how good/reliable the manufacturing and prices of HBM2 will be at the time of release.

 

If the cost of that is too high, we will never see VEGA 20 as Gamers. At least not with 4 Stacks. With 2 its more likely, though you will loose performance because of half the Bandwith...

 

I don't know, I don't really see VEGA 20 in Desktop, especially with the next generation of the others on the doorstep...

 

Because at the time, it makes little sense to offer that for 800€ or more...

But to be honest, if I start to think about it a bit more, It might be likely, that they just don't announce it and just switch Polaris 14nm with Polaris 12nm and just increase the efficiency.

 

Because there isn't that much gained with +10 or 15% higher performance but 30% lower power consumption.

The first e see those chips might be in Notebooks...

 

And also it depends on the price GF can give AMD for that chip. It might be possible that they can get a very nice Price for the new Chip for various reasons and thus can lower the cost as well. So I'm beginning to see a Polaris 10 based card with about the same clocks, maybe 6 or 8gbps Memory at around 1250MHz and 200€ or lower.

HBM isnt the factor for Vega20, sure HBM going down in price would help but if HBM price is the same it doesnt cost them any more to make than current vega 10. GF isnt even producing Vega 7nm yet, it's on TSMC and you can bet that GF wont be charging AMD more than TMSC

[leadeater]

14 minutes ago, Swatson said:

There's been lots of speculation and rumor of vega 7nm on gaming cards.

Yea I know, it's just that all those rumors stemmed from that Computex press conference, what Lisa said, and the 7nm Pro cards popping up either in shipment manifests or benchmark sites. Always good to be aware of the source of these things since it gives fairly good context as to why they exist, if all rumor sources only ever actually pointed to 7nm Vega pro cards then that's all it points to.

 

Just saying I wouldn't read much in to it other than 7nm gaming is coming, moving that to 7nm Vega is likely only going to lead to disappointment when it's doesn't come. If it were going to be 7nm Vega I have very little doubt those exact types of words would have been used just like they were when talking about the 7nm Vega pro cards.

 

I'm not trying to say your opinion is wrong just giving a warning to be careful about expectations.

[S w a t s o n]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Yea I know, it's just that all those rumors stemmed from that Computex press conference, what Lisa said, and the 7nm Pro cards popping up either in shipment manifests or benchmark sites. Always good to be aware of the source of these things since it gives fairly good context as to why they exist, if all rumors only ever actually pointed to 7nm Vega pro cards then that's all it points to.

 

Just saying I wouldn't read much in to it other than 7nm gaming is coming, moving that to 7nm Vega is likely only going to lead to disappointment when it's doesn't come. If it were going to be 7nm Vega I have very little doubt those exact types of words would have been used just like they were when talking about the 7nm Vega pro cards.

 

I'm not trying to say your opinion is wrong just giving a warning to be careful about expectations.

Honestly, there's no real expectation for me, I have no desire to purchase any iteration of vega anymore and I honestly don't think  vega 7nm (instinct or gaming) will do much for AMD other than make vega nano and possibly dual gpu vega more possible. If AMD decides to skip vega 7nm for gamers, then I'm wrong but I'm not mad LUL

[Stefan Payne]

17 minutes ago, Swatson said:

HBM isnt the factor for Vega20, sure HBM going down in price would help but if HBM price is the same it doesnt cost them any more to make than current vega 10. GF isnt even producing Vega 7nm yet, it's on TSMC and you can bet that GF wont be charging AMD more than TMSC

HBM is the issue as the problem isn't the cost of the Chip nor the HBM.

Its putting the stuff together that is the problem. And with VEGA 20 you almost double the complexety of manufacutring by adding two additional chips to the Interposer, thus causing more "garbage".

As you can't reuse any of that stuff when it gets damage during assembly.

 

So in a worst case scenario, you throuw away 4 good HBM Stacks and a good VEGA 20 Die because of an error during assembly.

And that is what drives the cost.

[S w a t s o n]

1 minute ago, Stefan Payne said:

HBM is the issue as the problem isn't the cost of the Chip nor the HBM.

Its putting the stuff together that is the problem. And with VEGA 20 you almost double the complexety of manufacutring by adding two additional chips to the Interposer, thus causing more "garbage".

As you can't reuse any of that stuff when it gets damage during assembly.

 

So in a worst case scenario, you throuw away 4 good HBM Stacks and a good VEGA 20 Die because of an error during assembly.

And that is what drives the cost.

Ah see, I don't think Vega20 for gamers will be 4 stack unless they want a meme-tier sku. The amount of vram currently available with vega10 is fine, more bandwidth is better but I think this would be a shrink mainly with same number of stacks, no need to force 4 stacks when 2 did the job.

[Taf the Ghost]

3 minutes ago, Swatson said:

Honestly, there's no real expectation for me, I have no desire to purchase any iteration of vega anymore and I honestly don't think  vega 7nm (instinct or gaming) will do much for AMD other than make vega nano and possibly dual gpu vega more possible. If AMD decides to skip vega 7nm for gamers, then I'm wrong but I'm not mad LUL

We might get the "RX Vega 64 Fury Edition" as something of a limited edition GPU to burn off some of the dies they end up with. If AMD was expecting lower yields but ended up with a lot more, they might just sell them as a special edition. Nvidia just gave away some GV100 CEO edition cards because they clearly had too many from the R&D stock.

 

Considering "Vega 20" should draw a lot less power, it might actually work pretty well. Especially if the 1180 is sitting at ~800 USD. Dropping a 650USD special edition, limited run could make some sense.

[S w a t s o n]

1 minute ago, Taf the Ghost said:

We might get the "RX Vega 64 Fury Edition" as something of a limited edition GPU to burn off some of the dies they end up with. If AMD was expecting lower yields but ended up with a lot more, they might just sell them as a special edition. Nvidia just gave away some GV100 CEO edition cards because they clearly had too many from the R&D stock.

 

Considering "Vega 20" should draw a lot less power, it might actually work pretty well. Especially if the 1180 is sitting at ~800 USD. Dropping a 650USD special edition, limited run could make some sense.

No, I want R9 Fury Nano Vega Edition

[Taf the Ghost]

1 minute ago, Swatson said:

No, I want R9 Fury Nano Vega Edition

Dragon Platinum Stellar Edition.

 

But, I do think a special edition would be both cool & profitable for AMD. If yields are such that it's worth selling a limited run. RX Vega is still a good product, it's just far more expensive to produce than AMD expected and they have to run it too hot to meet the current market. 

[S w a t s o n]

5 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Dragon Platinum Stellar Edition.

 

But, I do think a special edition would be both cool & profitable for AMD. If yields are such that it's worth selling a limited run. RX Vega is still a good product, it's just far more expensive to produce than AMD expected and they have to run it too hot to meet the current market. 

Honestly, I dont think vega costing more to make even matters, they can barely keep them in stock. We'll see how the mining crash affects that going forward but so far RTG is printing money from vega both semi-custom and discrete.

 

They could be printing money faster I suppose but my point is that I'm guessing RTG/AMD consider vega very successful so far

[Taf the Ghost]

8 minutes ago, Swatson said:

Honestly, I dont think vega costing more to make even matters, they can barely keep them in stock. We'll see how the mining crash affects that going forward but so far RTG is printing money from vega both semi-custom and discrete.

 

They could be printing money faster I suppose but my point is that I'm guessing RTG/AMD consider vega very successful so far

It's been Zen-like in the way they've approached it. It's a central design they are putting in practically anything they can. Issue for gamers is that GPUs are actually diverging more than CPUs when it comes to what is important for Games. Vega is a monster compute card, but, well, GCN issues.

[SliceT]

If they dont have navi this year, I guess this is likely. They get lower cost and higher performance, that might get some people to buy as long as nvidia don't have their 1160 out by then.

 

This is good news for the guys at Asrock, they came a bit late, at least now they might have some new GPU to play with and come up with a cool design.

[Doobeedoo]

12 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

But to be honest, if I start to think about it a bit more, It might be likely, that they just don't announce it and just switch Polaris 14nm with Polaris 12nm and just increase the efficiency.

 

Because there isn't that much gained with +10 or 15% higher performance but 30% lower power consumption.

The first e see those chips might be in Notebooks...

 

And also it depends on the price GF can give AMD for that chip. It might be possible that they can get a very nice Price for the new Chip for various reasons and thus can lower the cost as well. So I'm beginning to see a Polaris 10 based card with about the same clocks, maybe 6 or 8gbps Memory at around 1250MHz and 200€ or lower.

I mean, another Polaris refresh though, it should really be a cheap card. Specially if something like 7nm Vega comes maybe or even Navi with around performance but half the price of og Vega. Maybe we'll see something like a mid and mid-to-high range cards this year. But next year I'd expect a new flagship really.

[Taf the Ghost]

36 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

I mean, another Polaris refresh though, it should really be a cheap card. Specially if something like 7nm Vega comes maybe or even Navi with around performance but half the price of og Vega. Maybe we'll see something like a mid and mid-to-high range cards this year. But next year I'd expect a new flagship really.

If AMD could fine 20% more performance on Polaris by a respin + tweaks, that'd put it only about 8-10% behind the GTX 1070 it would be the best buy in the 250-300 USD range.

 

Obviously, the MSRP categories have been little more than wishful thinking for a year, so I'm expecting we're going to see some really large realignments of those segments coming in the next generation from both companies.

 

The other thing to keep in mind is that Nvidia's next generation is coming around soon enough. It's on TSMC's semi-custom node for Nvidia. The dies are just getting bigger, so while it's not quite a respin for Nvidia (there's going to be deeper updates than just more CUDA cores), at some level that's just what they're doing for gaming. That's going to shift the product stack up about 20-35% by the time the entire slate has launched. "North Star" would fit to keep AMD segment competitive until they launch their entire product line on 7nm over the next year.

[Taf the Ghost]

@leadeater

 

To make the AMD GPU IP stack even more confusing, I'd forgotten about the APU-slot design.

 

https://wccftech.com/amd-fenghuang-apu-3dmark-specs-performance-leak/

 

We'll see where it ends up, but that also means there separate designs with 28 & 24 CUs all on 14nm. What if AMD just launches as 40 CU design with the 12nm performance benefits. That'd allow for a cutdown of say 34 or 36 CUs for the RX 670, as well.

[Trixanity]

2 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

If AMD could fine 20% more performance on Polaris by a respin + tweaks, that'd put it only about 8-10% behind the GTX 1070 it would be the best buy in the 250-300 USD range.

 

Obviously, the MSRP categories have been little more than wishful thinking for a year, so I'm expecting we're going to see some really large realignments of those segments coming in the next generation from both companies.

 

The other thing to keep in mind is that Nvidia's next generation is coming around soon enough. It's on TSMC's semi-custom node for Nvidia. The dies are just getting bigger, so while it's not quite a respin for Nvidia (there's going to be deeper updates than just more CUDA cores), at some level that's just what they're doing for gaming. That's going to shift the product stack up about 20-35% by the time the entire slate has launched. "North Star" would fit to keep AMD segment competitive until they launch their entire product line on 7nm over the next year.

Wouldn't it just be tweaked for 12nm to achieve higher clock speeds and call it a day? Polaris chips were clocked kinda low. They did very little work for Ryzen so it's doable for Polaris.

[C2HWarrior]

18 hours ago, jasonc_01 said:

AMD you say? New graphics cards you say? A refresh you say? 

 

 

WHO CARES until AMD have a NEW graphics product that isn't a generation behind Nvidias graphics performance, if not farther.  Seems like AMD is always trying to best Nvidias current king of the mountain at the end of its life cycle, just to have them drop next gen and laugh. Sad really, would love for AMD to bring competition back to the graphics market but i think at this rate Intel will be the one to do it.

Actually. Alot of people will care. The majority of people buy midrange cards like the 1060 or 580. 15% increase in performance in the same price bracket is quite a nice upgrade for consumers if you ask me. We'll be waiting at least a year and half for amd to return to the true high end market but in the mean time providing solid competition in the midrange for Nvidia is nothing but good.

[jasonc_01]

OMG, I'm dying. AMD.... return to high end graphics..... LMAO!

 

Every time we hear from AMD and fanboys that this time its different, aiming at the high end Blah Blah Blah. Its fallen far short every time in the last 5 years, and AMD re branded the same GPU's though as many as 3 generations of cards and multiple GPU's. 

 

Prediction,  AMD's next flagship card will trade blows with a GTX 1080ti..... and be slower than an GTX 1180 but trade blows with the GTX 1170

 

With that said I think you completely missed my point, AMD may drop this refresh just to have Nvidia drop next gen GPU's faster at the same price or a little more.

 

This has happened the last 3 gens and been annoying. I want graphics competition but AMD keeps falling short, big time.

 

Imagine Vega 64 with GDDR5X for $399 and Vega 56 with GDDR5X for $249-$299 just but ditching HBM. 

 

Now that would have changed the game big time for AMD. Slower than a GTX 1080 but trading blows with GTX 1070ti for less. That would have been disruption.

 

Hey so Fingers crossed right 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, jasonc_01 said:

Imagine Vega 64 with GDDR5X for $399 and Vega 56 with GDDR5X for $249-$299 just but ditching HBM. 

The MSRP of those cards wouldn't have been much different GDDR5X or HBM. HBM costs more but that's only one part of the total equation. AMD also went with much lower margins on Vega than they normally would, making the card cheaper would likely have meant increased margins not lower MSRP, would be lucky to see $30-$50 difference in MSRP with GDDR5X plus we all know how meaningless MRSP is anyway.

[Stefan Payne]

2 hours ago, jasonc_01 said:

OMG, I'm dying. AMD.... return to high end graphics.....

Wait and see...
The Frontend Design they have right now doesn't scale that well with more Shaders and so on. 

But there are examples where VEGA 64 beats 1080ti.

 

And even a Fury X beats a 1070ti in that game...

So it seems that the Problem isn't in general with the AMD GPUs but the Software. That's also what Mining showed.

Most of those perform better on AMD.

2 hours ago, jasonc_01 said:

 and AMD re branded the same GPU's though as many as 3 generations of cards and multiple GPU's. 

Yeah, if nobody buys the AMD Products, its not worth to invest in real refreshes and you have to reuse what you already have. Especially since that is what the OEMs expect.

Can't blame AMD for the Market, can you?

 

2 hours ago, jasonc_01 said:

Prediction,  AMD's next flagship card will trade blows with a GTX 1080ti..... and be slower than an GTX 1180 but trade blows with the GTX 1170

AMDs actual flagship already trades blows with the 1080ti. 
So your Prediction is already wrong.

There are already more games out there that prove that, where VEGA 64 is very close to the 1080ti

2 hours ago, jasonc_01 said:

With that said I think you completely missed my point, AMD may drop this refresh just to have Nvidia drop next gen GPU's faster at the same price or a little more.

Makes no sense...

You don't know how much AMD pays for this Refresh, what their plan is and what they can do with the Refresh.

 

Without those information, we can't assume anything.

BUT: We know that the changes made to Ryzen+ are pretty minor and the biggest one is the Switch to 12nm instead of 14nm. And we have a way higher clock rates.

 

There are some Pictures out there that show the advantages of the new 12nm vs. 14nm.

And you can use the same libary from 14nm with 12nm as well. That means that you can use the same design without much work on the newer process.

 

With a good deal from GF (wich is pretty likely), it makes sense to move to this process and keep Polaris in stock.

 

Right now we have two possibilitys:
a) use the Process for performance enhancements, possibily using the best of the best GDDDR5 SDRAM memory there is

b) use the Process for lower power consumption and don't use faster GDDR5 SDRAM but slower ones for maximum efficiency.

 

Or both, one SKU for higher efficiency, one for better performance.

 

2 hours ago, jasonc_01 said:

This has happened the last 3 gens and been annoying. I want graphics competition but AMD keeps falling short, big time.

Then you have to buy more AMD Products, so that they have money for R&D and are able to develop new things.

Even with the Budget AMD has, they are somewhat able to be competitive...

 

But when AMD was actually better, like in 2012, people still didn't buy them!

ANd if you did, you didn't need to replace the GPU up until 2016 or later.

 

2 hours ago, jasonc_01 said:

Imagine Vega 64 with GDDR5X for $399 and Vega 56 with GDDR5X for $249-$299 just but ditching HBM. 

...with another 50-60W Power Consumption, loss of the HBM Caching thing. Ähm, no.

 

HBM is a good thing, the only Problem is that the cost needs to come down.

But that's always the case with new technology. And AMD did codevelop this new technology and has been marketing it for years.

 

 

2 hours ago, jasonc_01 said:

Now that would have changed the game big time for AMD. Slower than a GTX 1080 but trading blows with GTX 1070ti for less. That would have been disruption.

NO, not really.

Because VEGA 64 has +50% Memory Bandwith.

 

And going for another 512bit Memory Interface Chip doesn't seem to make too much sense to me either.and that is what HBM is designed to replace.

At a lower footprint + power conssumption.