AMD Unveils Its 7nm Vega GPU

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, laminutederire said:

To be fair we should ask game dev to optimise their games like doom is regardless of what amd or Nvidia offers. Part of the story is that games on pc are made to leverage nvidias arch. Despite how how good another arch might be, the software will still reduce performance significantly if not done right. That's also why Nvidia is not willing to change of architecture at all.

It's a balance. One of the main differences between NVIDIA and AMD's architectures is that NVIDIA allows up to 32 threads per scheduling unit (a "warp" in their parlance), whereas AMD allows up to 64 threads per scheduling unit (or "wavefront"). The thing is that if you want to make sure the GPU doesn't encounter execution bubbles, it's important that you submit the maximum amount of threads per scheduling unit.

[Tribalinius]

22 hours ago, leadeater said:

7nm Navi is probably going to be better but it doesn't need to match Pascal it needs to match what ever is after it and it needs to do it without all the pitfalls of current Vega or it's going right back to being ignored.

I don't want to be pessimistic about Navi but as soon as it will/would show sign of performing better than the best nVidia's offering, nVidia will come out swinging with whatever they have been sitting on for a while to make sure they still dominate the market. Let's not forget Navi is still Raja's baby and Lisa has only been in charge of that mess since Vega's launch. Navi being pushed to 2019 makes it clear to me that the current arch is not doing as great as AMD predicted and will only serve as a stop gap between Vega and "Next Gen" while they figure out what their next moves are going to be. It will just be a sad conclusion of a overhyped train. I don't rule out a unicorn move from AMD but I doubt it will be before "Next Gen" and then probably would go head to head with nVidia on "Next Gen" refresh after that.

I'm kind of happy sitting out of a platform upgrade until TR3 to see how it pans out but that PC will be probably bleeding red. The 970\GPP fiascos left a bad taste in my mouth. nVidia products are excellent but fooling customers and holding partners at gunpoint are really awful and scummy tactics. I'm not saying AMD is as white as snow but they pale in comparison with nVidia lately.

[VanayadGaming]

22 hours ago, TheRandomness said:

'Bad performance'
Small reminder that the performance wasn't what made Vega bad, it was the power consumption and price.

Performance was between 1080 and 1080ti. So ... yeah, If a 1080 is good, then so is a vega64.
About the price, yeah ...that was nasty, but the power consumption I don't really care. Electricity is cheap here. 

 

 

23 hours ago, Princess Cadence said:

Intel brings a 28 cores i9 that can sustain 5ghz overclock... yawns to TR2.

 

When you need to go as low as 7nm to have any chance of competing with the competition's 16nm... lmao nope nVidia is also yawning.

Well, I'm laughing at the completely failed PR stunt on intel's part, and all the news articles that actually bought in on it that they can achieve 5Ghz on all cores....without mentioning the 1hp air conditioning unit behind the stand and the 1kW+ power draw of that thing. Really. It wasn't impressive. It was desperate. 

[laminutederire]

1 hour ago, Tribalinius said:

I don't want to be pessimistic about Navi but as soon as it will/would show sign of performing better than the best nVidia's offering, nVidia will come out swinging with whatever they have been sitting on for a while to make sure they still dominate the market. Let's not forget Navi is still Raja's baby and Lisa has only been in charge of that mess since Vega's launch. Navi being pushed to 2019 makes it clear to me that the current arch is not doing as great as AMD predicted and will only serve as a stop gap between Vega and "Next Gen" while they figure out what their next moves are going to be. It will just be a sad conclusion of a overhyped train. I don't rule out a unicorn move from AMD but I doubt it will be before "Next Gen" and then probably would go head to head with nVidia on "Next Gen" refresh after that.

I'm kind of happy sitting out of a platform upgrade until TR3 to see how it pans out but that PC will be probably bleeding red. The 970\GPP fiascos left a bad taste in my mouth. nVidia products are excellent but fooling customers and holding partners at gunpoint are really awful and scummy tactics. I'm not saying AMD is as white as snow but they pale in comparison with nVidia lately.

Nvidia doesn't seem to have anything though. Only thing they seem to have is shrunk Pascal and bigger Pascal. So... Pascal. So their performance for the next few years are pretty much predictable.

[cj09beira]

1 hour ago, Tribalinius said:

I don't want to be pessimistic about Navi but as soon as it will/would show sign of performing better than the best nVidia's offering, nVidia will come out swinging with whatever they have been sitting on for a while to make sure they still dominate the market. Let's not forget Navi is still Raja's baby and Lisa has only been in charge of that mess since Vega's launch. Navi being pushed to 2019 makes it clear to me that the current arch is not doing as great as AMD predicted and will only serve as a stop gap between Vega and "Next Gen" while they figure out what their next moves are going to be. It will just be a sad conclusion of a overhyped train. I don't rule out a unicorn move from AMD but I doubt it will be before "Next Gen" and then probably would go head to head with nVidia on "Next Gen" refresh after that.

I'm kind of happy sitting out of a platform upgrade until TR3 to see how it pans out but that PC will be probably bleeding red. The 970\GPP fiascos left a bad taste in my mouth. nVidia products are excellent but fooling customers and holding partners at gunpoint are really awful and scummy tactics. I'm not saying AMD is as white as snow but they pale in comparison with nVidia lately.

i dont get the raja hate much, sure vega didn't go as planed, but which what raja had to work with there wasn't much that could be done, the only thing that could have made a difference would have been to not even try to go to the high end and release a small vega gpu on gddr5/5x but that would also mean no server market penetration for amd, which is something really important, i dont think the reason he left is because he was fired, to me it seems he might have been frustrated due to the lack of R&D, 

with navi targeting the main stream market again there is a good chance it will be competitive, my guess is that performance will be in the 1080 ti level but at a much lower price point, probably using gddr6.

vega project had many outside problems that made it hard to be successful on the consumer side, first the node wasn't the best, then hbm was delayed multiple times and in the end it didn't even reach the target frequency of 1ghz (around 5 % performance lost right there, more for the v56), then vega's new features were shown to be very hard to code to allow a broad use of them, and then the slow hbm that wasn't great to begin with doubled in price due to memory "shortages", so in the end the only thing i could say he could have done differently would be to make vega on tsmc, but that might have meant added costs which would increase the msrp 

[Tribalinius]

4 hours ago, cj09beira said:

i dont get the raja hate much, sure vega didn't go as planed, but which what raja had to work with there wasn't much that could be done, the only thing that could have made a difference would have been to not even try to go to the high end and release a small vega gpu on gddr5/5x but that would also mean no server market penetration for amd, which is something really important, i dont think the reason he left is because he was fired, to me it seems he might have been frustrated due to the lack of R&D, 

with navi targeting the main stream market again there is a good chance it will be competitive, my guess is that performance will be in the 1080 ti level but at a much lower price point, probably using gddr6.

vega project had many outside problems that made it hard to be successful on the consumer side, first the node wasn't the best, then hbm was delayed multiple times and in the end it didn't even reach the target frequency of 1ghz (around 5 % performance lost right there, more for the v56), then vega's new features were shown to be very hard to code to allow a broad use of them, and then the slow hbm that wasn't great to begin with doubled in price due to memory "shortages", so in the end the only thing i could say he could have done differently would be to make vega on tsmc, but that might have meant added costs which would increase the msrp 

I don't hate him, he probably poured his soul in the project and I'm sure he did his best. We don't know what happened behind the scene at AMD (R&D issues, HBM issues, "Raja", tight schedules, etc.) but the reality is Navi was already well underway when he left and Lisa picked up the pieces that remained in order to finish it. If they can get a 1080Ti redux at half the price, it will already be good but a lot of people are secretly wishing for a home run coming from AMD with Navi. They won't settle for less than that and I fear they will throw the towel with Navi.

[Tribalinius]

5 hours ago, laminutederire said:

Nvidia doesn't seem to have anything though. Only thing they seem to have is shrunk Pascal and bigger Pascal. So... Pascal. So their performance for the next few years are pretty much predictable.

We don't know for sure but, as many other said, they won't have any new competitor in the ring before 2019. Why rush a product to market with all the expenses that goes with it when all it's going to beat is their own offering at this point anyway? They are going to milk Pascal until Christmas if there's nothing new in the pipe until Q1 from AMD.

 

Personally, I'm sure they are playing the waiting game to see how it pans out with AMD and Intel in 2019 before announcing anything tangible in regards of Ampere. If they see a direct threat to their dominance coming from AMD or Intel, they won't have any other choice than to play ball and reveal a part of their hand but for now, I'm sure we'll only an another sku reshuffle / refresh until Q1 next year.

Time will tell

[Trixanity]

11 hours ago, Tribalinius said:

We don't know for sure but, as many other said, they won't have any new competitor in the ring before 2019. Why rush a product to market with all the expenses that goes with it when all it's going to beat is their own offering at this point anyway? They are going to milk Pascal until Christmas if there's nothing new in the pipe until Q1 from AMD.

 

Personally, I'm sure they are playing the waiting game to see how it pans out with AMD and Intel in 2019 before announcing anything tangible in regards of Ampere. If they see a direct threat to their dominance coming from AMD or Intel, they won't have any other choice than to play ball and reveal a part of their hand but for now, I'm sure we'll only an another sku reshuffle / refresh until Q1 next year.

Time will tell

Well, we're probably seeing a product launch within two months considering that they're presenting technical details on said product at HotChips in August. Unless Nvidia scrapped those plans at the last minute of course but that would still mean they'd have spent tons of money sampling a product only to not release it.

[Taf the Ghost]

16 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Well, we're probably seeing a product launch within two months considering that they're presenting technical details on said product at HotChips in August. Unless Nvidia scrapped those plans at the last minute of course but that would still mean they'd have spent tons of money sampling a product only to not release it.

Gamescom is the end of August, just after HotChip, and one rumor going around is Nvidia is going to have a big presence there. It looks a lot like a September or October launch window seems likely. 

[Trixanity]

21 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Gamescom is the end of August, just after HotChip, and one rumor going around is Nvidia is going to have a big presence there. It looks a lot like a September or October launch window seems likely. 

Nvidia doesn't (as far as I know) present technical details on unreleased products so I imagine that they'll at least pull a paper launch beforehand; perhaps with a FE card in limited quantities.

[Taf the Ghost]

55 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Nvidia doesn't (as far as I know) present technical details on unreleased products so I imagine that they'll at least pull a paper launch beforehand; perhaps with a FE card in limited quantities.

My assumption is we get the annoucement probably before HotChips, FE & AIB launch dates, then a big show off at Gamescom. Gamescom is kind of the place to launch a gaming GPU.

[Trixanity]

8 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

My assumption is we get the annoucement probably before HotChips, FE & AIB launch dates, then a big show off at Gamescom. Gamescom is kind of the place to launch a gaming GPU.

The rumored date was July 30th but making the announcement the week leading up to HotChips (starts on a Sunday) would make sense with Gamescom starting just as HotChips ends the following Tuesday. I would assume they have FE cards available then (or soon after) and can showcase them there.

[Doobeedoo]

Lrobably data centers only, just being bridge to Navi anyway. And hopefully by Navi prices get back to normal and availability is there. 

[Taf the Ghost]

3 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

The rumored date was July 30th but making the announcement the week leading up to HotChips (starts on a Sunday) would make sense with Gamescom starting just as HotChips ends the following Tuesday. I would assume they have FE cards available then (or soon after) and can showcase them there.

While the rumor has floated out there, there's also denials of it from other sections. I think "GDDR6 supply" might be the issue here more than anything else.

[Trixanity]

1 minute ago, Taf the Ghost said:

While the rumor has floated out there, there's also denials of it from other sections. I think "GDDR6 supply" might be the issue here more than anything else.

That's true but it never stopped AMD going forward with HBM.

A limited launch, while painful and would draw criticism, would cement Nvidia's lead unanimously. By the time supply stabilizes (if we assume it isn't all gobbled up by miners) people would gave forgotten about it already. 

[Taf the Ghost]

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

That's true but it never stopped AMD going forward with HBM.

A limited launch, while painful and would draw criticism, would cement Nvidia's lead unanimously. By the time supply stabilizes (if we assume it isn't all gobbled up by miners) people would gave forgotten about it already. 

Considering the 1180 is going to slot in with 1080 Ti power at ~800USD, Nvidia is actually more sensitive to certain factors than AMD. Even then, AMD had to delay RX Vega by about 5 months because of HBM2 supply. Which is to say everyone wanted to buy everything but Vega from them with HBM2.

[cj09beira]

slightly more info on what will be launching @AtlasWraith
Radeon Instinct on twitter
"7nm Radeon Instinct has started sampling to customers and will launch in both server and workstation in 2H 2018"