Rooting for AMD hard right now

[Zberg]

Loving what they are doing with desktop CPUs right now.  However I have a question for people that know more than myself.

 

Will they be able to eventually put up some serious competition at the high end GPU realm?  Nothing makes me happier that they might* be crushing intel in gaming/productivity at an insane value (tests pending).  If they could do the same to the high end Nvidia GPU's a some point consumers would see a nice reprieve from the insane gouging that has been going on. 

 

Anyone have the dirt on some high end Navi stuff?

[Boinbo]

On 6/14/2019 at 7:45 PM, Zberg said:

Loving what they are doing with desktop CPUs right now.  However I have a question for people that know more than myself.

 

Will they be able to eventually put up some serious competition at the high end GPU realm?  Nothing makes me happier that they might* be crushing intel in gaming/productivity at an insane value (tests pending).  If they could do the same to the high end Nvidia GPU's a some point consumers would see a nice reprieve from the insane gouging that has been going on. 

 

Anyone have the dirt on some high end Navi stuff?

Currently Navi really isn't looking that hot, so idk about the GPU side. CPU side definitely, but GPU? Idk.

[RobFRaschke]

We don't know much of what's going to be possible yet frankly, but if they decided to come out with a much larger big brother o the Navi 10 that powers the 5700 XT once they're more comfortable with 7nm yields, then I'd say it's fairly possible to run up against the current 2080ti. We've no idea if there really is going to be a yet larger chip that becomes a 2080ti Super(god I hope they don't really call it that.) that it would then have to compete with.

 

However if you look at the actual die size of the Navi 10, and compare the raw compute units against the RTX 2070, you'll see an interesting story take shape. The RTX 2070 has 2304 compute units, which is ironically the same numbers as the RX 580 and RX 590, but also the same as the 5700 vanilla. The 5700XT has 2560. So the 2070 and 5700 have 90% of the shader units as the 5700XT. For the sake of ease, let's just say there is as close as possible to true parity between the 2070 and the 5700 XT. That means that the Turing architecture, ignoring tensor cores and RT cores, is ~11% more powerful per compute unit. Now we consider that the 2080ti has essentially double the cores of the 2070. That means AMD would also have to double the core count to get rough parity on performance. On the previous architecture, it would have been impossible. Vega could not scale beyond 64 sets of compute units, which made for 4096 compute units. That limitation is supposed to be fixed on this new architecture, but we don't know yet.

 

If we presume for a moment that it's not, 4096 Navi compute units would compete handily against roughly 3686 Turing compute units. Nvidia has nothing in that range at all. The 2080 is 3072, or another 20% smaller. So it's odds of competing there would be very good. If the rumors of a 2080 Super(nope not getting better) are true, it's 3072 compute units and higher bandwidth memory, but it should still be crushed by a 4096 compute unit Navi GPU.

 

Now the 2080 Ti's 4352 compute units would need 4800+ navi compute units or if they did 76 blocks, it would be 4864. 64 to 76 sets of compute units is a 20% increase, which is no small feat at all.

 

However if we look at die size and transistor count as a factor of cost, it's a really interesting story. The 2070 has 10,800 transistors and the 5700 XT has 10,300 so similar there, despite the 10% more compute units on 5700 XT, but no RT or Tensor cores. So quite similar. However the 2070's die size is 445 square millimeters. The 5700 XT's die size is 251 square millimeters. THAT IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE! The Navi is 56% the size of Turing in the same performance category because of 7nm. That means on a given wafer size, AMD is getting MANY more dies than Nvidia. Which means that cost per core would be much lower, except that it's a brand new process.

 

So, it's really complicated, and the TL;DR is it depends entirely on if they can exceed 4096 compute units with this architecture, if so, then with 7nm, it's not impossible at all, but it's REALLY hard.

[RobFRaschke]

43 minutes ago, Boinbo said:

Currently Navi really isn't looking that hot, so idk about the GPU side. CPU side definitely, but GPU? Idk.

I'm curious why you say that? What about Navi isn't tripping your trigger?

[Boinbo]

On 6/14/2019 at 8:30 PM, RobFRaschke said:

I'm curious why you say that? What about Navi isn't tripping your trigger?

It's pricing is similar of an rtx 2060 and 2070, but a bit more expensive. And also, once the Super GeForce cards come out, the rtx cards will be even cheaper, have better value, and have Ray tracing.

[RobFRaschke]

4 minutes ago, Boinbo said:

It's pricing is similar of an rtx 2060 and 2070, but a bit more expensive. And also, once the Super GeForce cards come out, the rtx cards will be even cheaper, have better value, and have Ray tracing.

Except until we actually have any idea what Super will be, aside from leads, the 5700XT should be 2070 performance at $50 cheaper(10%) and the 5700 should(*should*) spank the 2060 for $20 more than MSRP, right where the bulk of 2060 sales are actually happening.

 

Things will definitely change when Nvidia issues their reply to Navi, but with 7nm and the die size, I really can't help but think that AMD has room to go dollar for dollar with Nvidia on performance, and this is just the first Navi GPU launched. There's generally speaking, no such thing as a single die, two SKU GPU family.

[Boinbo]

On 6/14/2019 at 9:39 PM, RobFRaschke said:

Except until we actually have any idea what Super will be, aside from leads, the 5700XT should be 2070 performance at $50 cheaper(10%) and the 5700 should(*should*) spank the 2060 for $20 more than MSRP, right where the bulk of 2060 sales are actually happening.

The fact is, a new series of GPUs are being released, making the older ones cheaper, it doesn't matter too much I would say, but then again, we have to wait and see.

 

On 6/14/2019 at 9:39 PM, RobFRaschke said:

Things will definitely change when Nvidia issues their reply to Navi, but with 7nm and the die size, I really can't help but think that AMD has room to go dollar for dollar with Nvidia on performance, and this is just the first Navi GPU launched. There's generally speaking, no such thing as a single die, two SKU GPU family.

I think the Super GeForce cards are the response, correct me if I'm wrong. And yeah, AMD has really stepped up their game here. I am just disappointed because personally, I felt the Navi cards would be better. They're still good, don't get me wrong, but not as good as I thought, but again, that's just me.

[Mister Woof]

Not upgrading from my Vega 64

[RobFRaschke]

7 hours ago, Boinbo said:

The fact is, a new series of GPUs are being released, making the older ones cheaper, it doesn't matter too much I would say, but then again, we have to wait and see.

 

I think the Super GeForce cards are the response, correct me if I'm wrong. And yeah, AMD has really stepped up their game here. I am just disappointed because personally, I felt the Navi cards would be better. They're still good, don't get me wrong, but not as good as I thought, but again, that's just me.

They are the response, we just have no idea what they are or how big of a performance bump they'll be.

 

Considering the history of GCN, and the computer units on the RX590/580/480, and that the 5700 has the same number of compute units and should absolutely wipe the floor with the 2060, the generational improvement is really good. It's not Core Duo, Ryzen or A64 astonishing, but anytime you hope for that, keep in mind there are three examples in the last 20+ years.

[RobFRaschke]

Another thing I can't help but wonder about is absolutely like adding 2+2 and saying the answer could be coconut. Also, I have absolutely no evidence that AMD is even exploring this direction.

 

However, on the heels of the dual GPU Vega Pro launch, and with PCIe Gen 4, a dual Navi 10 card could make good sense, if the software/drivers are there.

 

My main thinking here, is that Navi 10 has 16 PCIe Gen 4 lanes, but just 8 of those lanes going to the CPU would give it the same bandwidth as 16 PCIe Gen 3 lanes, and the other 8 lanes could be used as an interconnect to the other GPU. High-speed communication between the GPUs has always been one of the major bottlenecks of SLI. AMD has previously done dual GPU single card designs to get around that issue, and Navi has an ace in the hole in terms of making it practical. But it could just be wishful thinking on my part. I might actually shell out for a 5900XT2 dual Navi 10 card just because I missed out on the 295X2 back in the day.

[Epoxe]

I dont get it. After years of doing jack crap to drive competition they finally have reached parity for real world game performance. Why cheer mediocrity? Why is everyone cheering AMD before samples are even in testers hands?

[AngryBeaver]

Just wait until the intel GPUs start hitting the market. It will really start to shake up the GPU market and hopefully the new competition will make it a better market for consumers.

[noperative]

4 hours ago, Epoxe said:

I dont get it. After years of doing jack crap to drive competition they finally have reached parity for real world game performance. Why cheer mediocrity? Why is everyone cheering AMD before samples are even in testers hands?

I have always been an AMD fanboy since Athlon 64 and I want to cheer so hard but, I completely agree with you here. Currently in the process of building a new machine but waiting to see independent testing to see how the new Ryzen chips stack up to the 9900k and if so, hopefully a little cheaper ( I doubt it though). As far as the graphics card, while I think what AMD has done with the new 5700's is great, I think I will still be sticking with nVidia on this one at east until AMD has a card that can compete toe to toe with nVidia's flagship card (whatever that may be at the time of release). I am hoping that the new "Super" cards will get the 2080 ti cards under 1k.

[RobFRaschke]

Can't we be excited to see performance parity driving prices down, or competition leading to new skus from the competitor? Or excited for the possibility of more going forward? This is the best time to be a PC enthusiast in the last 10-12 years IMHO!

[Leanora]

You and me both. Come on do better AMD, me and my stocks can use some more love!