UPDATE: LAUNCHED OFFICIALLY, REVIEWS ARE OUT. The RX5xx lineup has leaked in its entirety, launching April 18th (Polaris Refresh)

[Misanthrope]

37 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

They did pay too much for ATI but I honestly don't think they could have done much else given where the industry was heading (although the better choice would have been going through with the Nvidia merger and giving the CEO position to the obviously more talented guy as was planned).

 

As I said they needed graphics IP because the market was heading towards SoC designs. You could argue they could have stayed on course with doing pure CPU products and maybe kept their underdog position below Intel. If Bulldozer still happened AMD would have been dead today though. Their semi-custom and GPU business kept them afloat. These would not have existed without the ATI purchase.

 

I honestly don't know how AMD could keep going as a pure CPU company in today's market. Sure, they might have been able to find decent ways of diversifying but that's just hindsight. Things could have gone more elegantly especially under better management. Poor management for over a decade tends to destroy companies (A recent example was Pebble and that only took a few years).

Right and what did those got them? Fucking nowhere: the consoles barely kept them alive and overall costs them more than what they put into I'm sure since Microsoft and Sony actually don't really go into a deal that would make sense for AMD they basically make extremely narrow profits on those for their investment and their SoC solutions have been disappointingly under performing to put it lightly.

 

They bet wrong and this supposed direction towards SoC designs ended up being realized by people producing cheaper, crappy performers that are just good enough as those to be found on mobile devices.

 

Don't get me wrong I've seen Nvidia waste their fucking time with Tegra and their stupid car stuff as well and criticize them as heavily but at the very least they didn't put themselves in the red buying an entirely new company while doing so.

[Dylanc1500]

34 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Right and what did those got them? Fucking nowhere: the consoles barely kept them alive and overall costs them more than what they put into I'm sure since Microsoft and Sony actually don't really go into a deal that would make sense for AMD they basically make extremely narrow profits on those for their investment and their SoC solutions have been disappointingly under performing to put it lightly.

 

They bet wrong and this supposed direction towards SoC designs ended up being realized by people producing cheaper, crappy performers that are just good enough as those to be found on mobile devices.

 

Don't get me wrong I've seen Nvidia waste their fucking time with Tegra and their stupid car stuff as well and criticize them as heavily but at the very least they didn't put themselves in the red buying an entirely new company while doing so.

AMD right now reminds me a lot of 3DFX to be honest. They can make a great product but are terrible at managing their business and now they are trying to come back with the compitition but are just not quite up to par.

[Energycore]

I remember a certain other company also refreshing an architecture from their 400 to their 500 series.

 

Except their 400 seies was an absolute mess whereas the RX 400s were at least decent (the RX 460 wasn't impressive though)

[Valentyn]

9 minutes ago, Dylanc1500 said:

AMD right now reminds me a lot of 3DFX to be honest. They can make a great product but are terrible at managing their business and now they are trying to come back with the compitition but are just not quite up to par.

 

3DFX's issue was that they tried to Fab all their own product, excluding their AIB's. In the end those AIB's went to ATI and NVIDIA, and 3DFX dug themselves into a hole.
AMD was at that point with GlobalFoundries; and the best choice they made was spinning it off, and eventually selling the rest.

 

Their issue now, for production at least is their contract with GloFo still.

 

Hell their console SoCs are manufactured at TSMC using the same 16nm process as NVIDIA Pascal.

It's arguably a better process than the 14nm LPP from GloFo; let's just hope this Polaris refresh shows some process improvements.

Otherwise I'll worry Vega is going to have the low clocks and power issues Polaris had on launch. 

 

9 minutes ago, Energycore said:

I remember a certain other company also refreshing an architecture from their 400 to their 500 series.

 

Except their 400 seies was an absolute mess whereas the RX 400s were at least decent (the RX 460 wasn't impressive though)

 

The GTX 500 series certainly solved a lot for NVIDIA. I still have a reference GTX 580 running downstairs on a little Solidworks station.

 

That issue was solved with a much improved process though. I just hope GloFo's process is improved enough. Although looking at the Clocks speed bump it doesn't look like it.

Not unless the RX 500 cards suddenly use less power than the 400 counterparts.

[Trixanity]

25 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Right and what did those got them? Fucking nowhere: the consoles barely kept them alive and overall costs them more than what they put into I'm sure since Microsoft and Sony actually don't really go into a deal that would make sense for AMD they basically make extremely narrow profits on those for their investment and their SoC solutions have been disappointingly under performing to put it lightly.

 

They bet wrong and this supposed direction towards SoC designs ended up being realized by people producing cheaper, crappy performers that are just good enough as those to be found on mobile devices.

 

Don't get me wrong I've seen Nvidia waste their fucking time with Tegra and their stupid car stuff as well and criticize them as heavily but at the very least they didn't put themselves in the red buying an entirely new company while doing so.

What do you mean by that? Intel are doing SoC designs and are making a fortune doing them (I'm not sure that Intel can be called cheap and crappy). It's pretty much impossible to sell a chip on the mainstream market that is not a SoC. It's only the enthusiast and high performance/server segment where you can sell a CPU. The bulk of the consumer market requires the graphics to be integrated. Granted, the profits in the server segment are glorious but then AMD would have exited the consumer market and only done server chips. Their margins would be good but their revenue would be slipping considerably. They would have backed themselves into a corner.

 

As for Nvidia wasting their time. I tend to agree. They went into the same trap that Intel did: trying to compete against Qualcomm. That and the fact the designs were mostly awful. It seems to be paying off now though; they just had to repurpose their work on Tegra to another market than mobile.

 

The first point is a bit far-fetched though. You're saying Microsoft and Sony would only make a deal with AMD that makes no sense for AMD (sounds like how Donald Trump imagines business deals should go down: no compromises and only one party should profit)? Then why would AMD make the deal? Both parties are obviously gonna negotiate for the best possible deal. The margins on the deals have most likely not been great but I suspect there is little chance a deal would be signed that would be a loss for AMD. You could argue they'll lose the money as a stepping stone to making money later but considering how poorly their finances are, they can't afford to throw money into a bottomless pit. So that hypothesis is extremely unlikely. AMD would simply not make the deal if it wasn't profitable in the end. You make it sound like AMD has no leverage and are forced to take any deal they get. There isn't really any other option in the market. Just look at Nintendo. They were forced to go for leftover Tegra chips because there simply wasn't any better options that wasn't overly expensive. The same goes here. AMD is the only company that can offer semi-custom high performance SoCs for a gaming console. I'm not saying they can strongarm Microsoft or Sony but they're certainly not giving into asinine deals.

[Misanthrope]

Yes but intel managed to produce igpus with crap performance yet minimal impact. They were smart about it and got them to be decent enough for multimedia and basic needs without breaking the bank or taking far too much chip realstate and such whereas AMDs and their APUs never managed to surpass even 100 to 150 bucks dedicated gpus so they were a wasted effort to truly transform anything.

 

As I said the market for SoCs went on a completely different direction: AMD could have competed by just licensing someone's crappy gpu to get to intel igpu levels which is render a desktop and 2D shit like videos and that's almost it. But they had to buy ATI and try and fail miserably for APUs. That basically fucked them big time if you consider the investment they put into it vs what they got which is a product almost nobody fucking bought: Again just some enthusiasts coming up with lame excuses for why they needed a media center without a dgpu which was crappier anyways.

[Phate.exe]

6 hours ago, HKZeroFive said:

The RX 500 series feels unnecessary. The RX 580 is literally just a RX 480 with a small clock increase and that's basically it. The non-blower style reference design isn't exactly something to be excited about.

I feel like half of the reason for the rebrand is just so everyone has to retest them on more mature drivers, and to have better silicon lottery odds.

 

Later-manufactured Polaris cards tended to require less power and clock higher, and through driver improvements the cards really did gain a lot of performance.  Between those two factors a launch 480 doesn't look nearly as one that would be tested right now.

 

I'm interested in seeing how much headroom they have left though.  If it ends up being like the 7870/270x rebrands, the cards will come with decent clockspeeds out of the box, but there won't really be much left on the table.

[AlTech]

8 hours ago, Energycore said:

I remember a certain other company also refreshing an architecture from their 400 to their 500 series.

 

Except their 400 seies was an absolute mess whereas the RX 400s were at least decent (the RX 460 wasn't impressive though)

the 460 was impressive from a power consumption perspective but it looks like AMD's sorted out better power consumption to allow all 1024 cores to be enabled.

[Energycore]

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

the 460 was impressive from a power consumption perspective but it looks like AMD's sorted out better power consumption to allow all 1024 cores to be enabled.

Well let's wait for the reviews before we say whether AMD did or did not compromise on power consumption.

[sgloux3470]

On ‎2017‎-‎04‎-‎13 at 9:09 AM, frozeNNN said:

Only question is why do they compare them with R9 3xx series? They probably know it's not an upgrade to RX series so they make the numbers look bigger  

Most people upgrade their GPU every 2-3 years.  (According to AMD/Nvidia)

 

This line up is meant to appeal to people who bought the 3xx series 2 years ago/ people on older hardware.

 

 

[sgloux3470]

11 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Yes but intel managed to produce igpus with crap performance yet minimal impact. They were smart about it and got them to be decent enough for multimedia and basic needs without breaking the bank or taking far too much chip realstate and such whereas AMDs and their APUs never managed to surpass even 100 to 150 bucks dedicated gpus so they were a wasted effort to truly transform anything.

 

As I said the market for SoCs went on a completely different direction: AMD could have competed by just licensing someone's crappy gpu to get to intel igpu levels which is render a desktop and 2D shit like videos and that's almost it. But they had to buy ATI and try and fail miserably for APUs. That basically fucked them big time if you consider the investment they put into it vs what they got which is a product almost nobody fucking bought: Again just some enthusiasts coming up with lame excuses for why they needed a media center without a dgpu which was crappier anyways.

 

Are you forgetting that both major consoles run on AMD APU's?  

 

I was also really disappointed more laptops didn't have AMD APU's in them.  They're very competent for that usecase.  

 

 

[Misanthrope]

11 minutes ago, sgloux3470 said:

 

Are you forgetting that both major consoles run on AMD APU's?  

 

I was also really disappointed more laptops didn't have AMD APU's in them.  They're very competent for that usecase.  

 

 

No I believe I did mention that on a previous point and bring up how is was probably a very unprofitable deal for them overall. That is not to say that is the one deal that probably kept them alive but that doesn't makes it a good idea considering the prices those consoles sell for they just can't make decent margins on that.

[Drak3]

12 hours ago, Trixanity said:

Intel are doing SoC designs and are making a fortune doing them (I'm not sure that Intel can be called cheap and crappy). It's pretty much impossible to sell a chip on the mainstream market that is not a SoC. It's only the enthusiast and high performance/server segment where you can sell a CPU. The bulk of the consumer market requires the graphics to be integrated.

An SoC is the CPU, Northbridge, Southbridge, and all platform native controllers in a single chip. Often, SoCs have iGPUs, but it's not explicitly required.

Currently, All Core i are CPUs: They only contain CPU cores and related controllers, Northbridge, and iGPU on certain models. Same for Pentium, Celeron, and Xeon

 

Core M are SoCs, and they aren't doing that well. They're mostly comprised of weak cores, and don't do much better than Core ix-xxxxU chips TDP-down settings, both in TDP and performance, and costs of machines equipped with either aren't that different. Basically, there's no real reason to use Core M outside of low end tablets that cost an arm anyways.

 

Atom/ Core X was a series of failed SoCs. Comprised exclusively of weak cores, but having higher base clocks than Core M, and having chips as recent as Broadwell. Cost of machines with these were low, with SDPs of around 2W (Core M's TDP was 4.5W), and the big sacrifice being on the iGPU side.

 

Intel canceled Atom completely, and Core M doesn't have many offerings worth looking into.

AMD's Ryzen is doing well, given AMD's reputation and the lack of R&D $$$$. But so far, no Ryzen offerings feature an iGPU.

[sgloux3470]

18 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

No I believe I did mention that on a previous point and bring up how is was probably a very unprofitable deal for them overall. That is not to say that is the one deal that probably kept them alive but that doesn't makes it a good idea considering the prices those consoles sell for they just can't make decent margins on that.

Even with low margins, the massive volume of console sales was likely a nice pay day.

[hoaxy32]

3 hours ago, sgloux3470 said:

Most people upgrade their GPU every 2-3 years.  (According to AMD/Nvidia)

 

This line up is meant to appeal to people who bought the 3xx series 2 years ago/ people on older hardware.

 

 

And that person is me, I'm coming from an MSI R9 390 8G. Looking forward to a healthy upgrade

[Trixanity]

4 hours ago, Drak3 said:

An SoC is the CPU, Northbridge, Southbridge, and all platform native controllers in a single chip. Often, SoCs have iGPUs, but it's not explicitly required.

Currently, All Core i are CPUs: They only contain CPU cores and related controllers, Northbridge, and iGPU on certain models. Same for Pentium, Celeron, and Xeon

 

Core M are SoCs, and they aren't doing that well. They're mostly comprised of weak cores, and don't do much better than Core ix-xxxxU chips TDP-down settings, both in TDP and performance, and costs of machines equipped with either aren't that different. Basically, there's no real reason to use Core M outside of low end tablets that cost an arm anyways.

 

Atom/ Core X was a series of failed SoCs. Comprised exclusively of weak cores, but having higher base clocks than Core M, and having chips as recent as Broadwell. Cost of machines with these were low, with SDPs of around 2W (Core M's TDP was 4.5W), and the big sacrifice being on the iGPU side.

 

Intel canceled Atom completely, and Core M doesn't have many offerings worth looking into.

AMD's Ryzen is doing well, given AMD's reputation and the lack of R&D $$$$. But so far, no Ryzen offerings feature an iGPU.

That's the classic definition of a SoC but for accuracy's sake let's call it SoC-like designs then. Everyone has been moving more and more stuff on die for various reasons. Intel has even been moving things off die again. The point is the market has moved towards integrating most or everything onto the die. Intel has decided the trade-off for moving everything on die wasn't worth and/or they prefer the flexibility of not doing so. Other than that, I'll refrain from reiterating, so my points from previous posts especially about AMD and their need for graphics IP can be read for context.

 

Core M is based on the same architecture as the 'bigger' cores hence if you lower their TDP the performance is roughly the same. I don't know what else to tell you. Its performance is what can be achieved when scaling their architecture down. You could argue they should build it from the ground up for better performance scaling but I'm not sure the gains (if any) justify the cost and I'm sure they'd rather not reinvent the wheel.

 

Atom is not complely dead yet. Apollo is the latest but they've killed many of the platforms based on Atom. Intel's roadmap hasn't indicated any replacement for Apollo (but it is relatively new and not every future product is public) and it's very likely Intel has decided to axe Atom completely. I'm guessing they're trying to exit as gracefully as possible. Besides Atom was supposed to be the cheap alternative to Core but we all know Intel doesn't do cheap. So it was an odd product. In any case it was most likely a decent bottom line if we exclude their phone platform and their subsidized business model. It just didn't align with their business strategy.

 

We have Ryzen APUs coming for mobile before the end of the year and for desktop at the beginning of next year.

Things will very likely look very good for AMD by then. It all depends on design wins.

[Humbug]

The below is related to Vega high end rather than Polaris refresh but I am going to post it here anyway.

The first time AMD has commented directly about Vega performance vs Nvidia high end.

 

QUESTION : I know you won't be able to say much, but how does Vega compare to the GTX 1080ti and the Titan XP?

ANSWER : Vega performance compared to the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan Xp looks really nice.

 

From AMD's DON WOLIGROSKI.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-ama,5018-11.html

[NumLock21]

Guys Guys! I just infiltrated AMD HQ and managed to get the inside scoop on a very important piece of information!

AMD RX 680 is confirmed for future release!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jito463]

3 hours ago, Humbug said:

The below is related to Vega high end rather than Polaris refresh but I am going to post it here anyway.

The first time AMD has commented directly about Vega performance vs Nvidia high end.

 

QUESTION : I know you won't be able to say much, but how does Vega compare to the GTX 1080ti and the Titan XP?

ANSWER : Vega performance compared to the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan Xp looks really nice.

 

From AMD's DON WOLIGROSKI.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-ama,5018-11.html

Well, how about that.  It's not just nice, it's "really" nice.  Glad we got that cleared up.  Would it hurt them to provide a bit more details?

[Trixanity]

1 minute ago, Jito463 said:

Well, how about that.  It's not just nice, it's "really" nice.  Glad we got that cleared up.  Would it hurt them to provide a bit more details?

They can't legally provide details that aren't announced 'properly'. That's what their community managers have said anytime they've been asked about unreleased products; basically something along the lines of "we're a publicly traded company and can't disclose details that haven't been announced".

 

Besides, the guy is a CPU product manager, so he probably has limited access to graphics products anyway.

 

We'll know more within a month (Vega should be out by Computex at the latest which is between late May and early June).

[Humbug]

4 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Well, how about that.  It's not just nice, it's "really" nice.  Glad we got that cleared up.  Would it hurt them to provide a bit more details?

well, at least it clarifies that AMD with Vega is targeting upto the Titan XP performance range rather than just the 1070/1080.

[captain cactus]

5 hours ago, Humbug said:

The below is related to Vega high end rather than Polaris refresh but I am going to post it here anyway.

The first time AMD has commented directly about Vega performance vs Nvidia high end.

 

QUESTION : I know you won't be able to say much, but how does Vega compare to the GTX 1080ti and the Titan XP?

ANSWER : Vega performance compared to the Geforce GTX 1080 Ti and the Titan Xp looks really nice.

 

From AMD's DON WOLIGROSKI.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-ama,5018-11.html

Eh, this comes from the same folks saying the Fury lineup is an overcloker's dream. I'll bench for the waitmarks. 

[Exty]

On 4/14/2017 at 3:59 AM, TheRandomness said:

Just saying to everyone who hasn't seen yet, the 580 scores 6880 in Firestrike Extreme. 

really? 1070 gets 11381

[The Benjamins]

My friend works at microcenter and they got some RX 580s in, will get a pic if I can.

 

Edit: MSI RX 580 listed as $250

 

[Taf the Ghost]

12 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

My friend works at microcenter and they got some RX 580s in, will get a pic if I can.

Makes sense, as the supposed release is Tuesday.