AMD Vega 10, Vega 11, Vega 12 and Vega 20 Rumors and Discussion
There were leaks about Raven Ridge samples earlier in the year, and there are Linux driver changes related to it and Vega features like the DSBR published recently (Linux drivers likely trailing internal Windows work). It seems far too late to be redesigning anything for the APU if it actually exists in physical form. It would probably be too late for significant change if it were less than six months to a year before that.
That this bring-up work seems like it has suffered from protracted development or a lack of development in advance of late-stage events like sample silicon may point to some form of disruption, or not having a full handle on the new elements of the architecture. Some of the claimed benefits of the new fabric and Zen's design efforts were related to a change in methodology and tools that allowed for more regularity, discoverability, and instrumentation in the hardware so that less time was spent in validation/fixes and more could be determined in advance. Perhaps that wasn't so readily applied to the graphics elements of the company.
Anarchist4000
Veteran
HBM is the likely future and we've yet to see how it applies, if at all, to APUs. It doesn't seem to be the holdup, but driver development given current feature state. Raja wouldn't have been at fault for skipping part of a product cycle as AMD indicated that was a higher level call to focus funds on Ryzen.
What possible metrics would he have been held to that they've seen double digit growth, increased market share, cleared most of the inventory thanks to mining, yet still "miss" the option? The more likely scenario is the bonuses we're tied to the CPU release as RTG technically would have outperformed.
Frenetic Pony
Veteran
The Etherium boom was going to make RTG sales great regardless of actual hardware. But it's certainly not a failure. Guy's probably just trying to save his marriage.
This is entirely likely. A Vega 10 can easily be cut straight in half, one HBM stack etc. etc. Unfortunately a Vega 32 wouldn't actually be on par with an Rx580, so the other option would be Vega 48, drop one shader engine instead of 2. That would hit above 580, but I wonder if it would be bandwidth limited with only one stack of HBM. For cost reasons I can't see it having 2. Even if they can get HBM2 running at full speed that works out to the same bandwidth a 580 already has, making it a potential bottleneck.
As should have been obvious, I was talking about the professional space not in the sense of professional game development, were physics just have to look borderline realistic ("Hair", really, that the best AMD and Nvidia can do?) but where structural integrity or even people's lives are at stake (fluid dynamics simulatin for air or space craft as one example). Where it's also a legal issue if you can proof - and watertight proof - whether or not your using reduced precision in order to save cost really did NOT contribute to that catastrophic flight frame failure due to resonance build up while travelling through a particular patch of air.
Otherwise, you might get away with cheaping out on precision. Maybe I should start using footnotes and legal disclaimers.
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Because slides are obviously known for conveying full and detailed information, right?
In any case, care to show a case where the white paper so bluntly negates the slides? I have done my work, time for you to make yours and prove your point.
That is more or less a correct assessment, with the exception being specific cases where performance increased more than the clock speed ratio in non gaming situations.
I don't get your point? That does not invalidate in any way that Vega performs better at professional applications in its FE incarnation, being competitive with Quadro P6000. Just like GP102 would perform better with Quadro drivers, before Titan XP got a driver upgrade, following Vega's launch. Both IHV's bottleneck consumer solutions in software so they dont compete with the professional ones. Your rebutal sounded more like "I must be right at all cost damnit!" than a logical, thought out, answer.
True, but if you read the thread, it was just an example how "very nice" could mean anything or nothing. Its nothing to go on about.
DavidGraham
Veteran
The point is, without pro drivers, 1080Ti/TitanXp is faster than RX Vega, but still slower than Quadros. With pro drivers Quadro 6000 is faster than Vega FE. In all cases GP102 is still faster than Vega in these applications. So it's not really competing there at all, except on price.
And again you are still ignoring that Compute has always been AMD's strong point since GCN came to be, even Crypto has been their strong point since VLIW5. So it's not like they made an effort to excel in these regards. You are still also ignoring the fact they overclocked the chip to hell and beyond to achieve these results. Saying Vega is one chip competing with 3 different chips is sugarcoating a dire situation, I can practicallly say that about just any chip if I cherrypick well enough some cases where it competes.
-Vega Pro will very likely not compete with Quadro GP102, because it's downclocked to 1200MHz.
-RX doesn't compete with GP102 in gaming at all.
-Vega Instinct is not known to compete with GP100 at this point, we haven't heard anything about it's performance since AMD showed that one marketing slide (and we all know how reliable those are).
-Vega FE is competing with TitanXP I some apps, but it falls behind it in gaming. However Vega FE is a vague product at best, no body knows who the chip is for? It doesn't use certified drivers so it can't be for pro uses, it doesn't game well, or even achieve good VR performance, so it can't be for game developers, they are a better served with a Titan. Maybe it's for a developer interested in AMD ecosystem?
You can say many thing about Vega in all it's incarations, but to be fair, „it doesn't game well, or even achieve good VR performance“ is a bit drastic. Yes, it is slower in most gaming applications than GP102-variants and also slower than GTX 1080 in a fair share of them. But you certainly can „game well“ on any Vega product released as of now.
DavidGraham
Veteran
I meant: it doesn't game as well, execuse my misspell. Though that bit about VR is not drastic IMO, VR performance even on the RX variant is absymal.
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Deleted member 13524
Guest
What's the difference? Are you calling "architectural efficiency" to perf/mm^2 by leaving TDP aside?
If so, has anyone made a Vega 10 vs GP102 comparison at ISO clocks? Downclock a Titan X down to say 1400MHz, do the same with a Vega 64 and see how they compare?
Last time I saw something like that, I think the Polaris 10 actually goes very close to a GP104 at ISO clocks for core and memory.
They at least have an impact in the clocks the GP100 can achieve at a given TDP compared to GP102. According to nvidia's own whitepapers, GP100's peak FP32 throughout is 10.6 TFLOPs (56SM @1480MHz) with a 300W TDP whereas GP102 can get about 20% more at 250W. This obviously has an impact in its graphics performance.
So the answer to your question is yes: GP100's 1/2 FP64 + 2xFP16 + more cache + nvlinks etc. do in fact have a negative impact on gaming performance.
They're not responsible for decreasing IPC, they're responsible for decreasing clocks at iso TDP.
There's a number of reasons why Vega isn't reaching the same gaming performance as GP102 at iso TDP:
1 - GlobalFoundries' 14LPP is substantially less efficient than TSMC's 16FF+ (from the posts of experts in this forum, there's at least a 20% difference in power consumption at iso clocks).
2 - As Raja confirmed 2 weeks ago some of the features aren't implemented in the driver yet (his statement implies they will be, and so have @Rys ' statements so far). Perhaps this discussion will be different when DSBR gets enabled even in automatic mode, since it'll affect both geometry performance and effective bandwidth.
3 - Also as mentioned by Raja in the same tweet, the Infinity Fabric being used in Vega 10 wasn't optimized for consumer GPUs and that also seems to be holding the GPU back (maybe by holding back the clocks at iso TDP). Why did they use IF in Vega 10? Perhaps because iterating IF in Vega 10 was an important stepping stone for optimizing the implementation for Navi or even Vega 11 and Raven Ridge. Perhaps HBCC was implemented around IF from the start. Perhaps Vega SSG doesn't have a PCIe controller for the SSDs and IF is being used to implement a PCIe controller in Vega.
4 - Compute-oriented features like 2*FP16, larger caches and HBCC prevent Vega 10 from achieving higher clocks at iso TDP, just like what happens with GP100.
Sorry but I still think that observatorion is pointless. What matters is Vega FE performance with drivers for professional applications. Wether nvidia cards with non-professional drivers have better performance or not is irrelevant since that is not their target market. Yes, a company might buy them for professional applications but they will a) not have guaranteed performance for their applications since nvidia can change performance at any time to optimised gaming and b) not have dedicated support from nVIDIA.
In several applications Vega FE is within 10% or less of Quadro P6000. That is competing in my book. Did you really check the link with Toms Hardware review?
The chip is not overclocked to hell and beyond, it was designed to achieve those clocks. Regardless if its sugar coating or not, its reality.
Where have you seen this information? Vega FE on PCPer hovers between 1300Mhz and 1500Mhz.
What do you mean by Vega Pro?
Also in the same review Vega FE is compared to Radeon Pro Duo (single chip). In most cases its more than 100% faster than the latter (while in gaming is only around 35-40%). Clearly there were changes done to geometry workloads to achieve that. However, like I speculated on a previous post, those changes afect the performance of other units (edited: please read tasks, not units) while gaming (which are not done in professional applications, freeing resources).
I never said that it did.
Yes, we need someone to develop a nice free benchmark for that!
Vega FE is a result from choices made to try and compete everywhere at once with an architecture that has suffered patches and band aids since the beginning, in reaction to nVIDIA strenghts. Everytime they make changes, it seems something gets broken or inneficient. GCN needs to die and they need to start from scratch (not literally from scratch but you get what I mean).
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Exactly! The fact that people think that compute features are absolutely free, in the sense that they dont affect gaming performance, baffles me.
I have my doubts it will make a huge impact, but we will see. I may be wrong but memory bandwidth is not the sole reason for Vega's "low" performance in games. The increase in TFLOPS might also not be enough to absorb all the new geometry stuff that has transitioned from fixed function to programmable. But, again, I may be completely off mark, dont hold my word on it.
True as well.
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Raven Ridge is still supposedly launching this month for mobile, and Raja doesn't start his sabattical until 25th, so there's still room for that (despite the "next product launch excitement in 2018" part)
You know, US time is not really the same as Europe . actually it is only 5:50 in Los Angeles and 8:51 in New York.
But with professional gpus, dont expect much as an announcement.
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D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
You're right, Ryzen Mobile is supposedly coming Q3. Maybe he's leaving right after that.
(I brought the discussion to this place)
Looking at Vega 56 vs. Vega 64 performance at iso clocks, it seems like those extra 8 NCUs in Vega 64 are twiddling their thumbs pretty much the whole time. At the average 1.59GHz clocks they had in that comparison, we're looking at 8 NCUs * 64 ALUs * 2 * 1,59 = >1.6 TFLOPs FP32 extra that the full Vega 10 is simply not using (EDIT: in games and gaming benchmarks which is what they tested, of course).
It does seem like Vega 10 was designed to get its ALUs to do more than what they're doing right now (e.g. getting those primitive shaders up and running), otherwise there would be little practical reason to launch a consumer GPU with all NCUs enabled.
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OK, that's very weird. Now I would like to see Vega 56 with Vega FE equivalent drivers in professional applications to see if the same thing happens or its only in games.
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DavidGraham
Veteran
A cut down GP104 does the same thing to Vega FE, does that mean GP104 can compete with all GPUs outhere? You can't take corner cases and generalize from there and call it competition.
WX9100 is the pro line of Vega, it's the one with actual certified drivers, it's base clock is 1200Mhz, and it uses 6+8 power connectors and a different cooler.
FWIW, drivers for Pro duo left a lot to be desired, the drivers were not able to extract the performance of both GPUs, so in alot of cases they act as one GPU, or slightly above it.
Designed or overclocked doesn't really mean much when the vendor is doing it, I will rephrase then, clearly AMD pushed the design of Vega outside of it's comfort zone to barely compete with even GP104. It's evident in all of these power profiles that achieve good balance between power and performance, but are yet ignored and replaced with the default profile that screws the balance over for a few more percents of fps.
I get it, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. However I do stress out that Vega is not a jack of all trade at all, it tries to compete on too many fronts but falls behind in most of them.
Anarchist4000
Veteran
Weird, but easily the result of software limiting. Executing NOPs in the face of a limit. Even 56 may be significantly idle. That'd be the reason the undervolting plus increased power limit does so much.
The chips appear to be using more energy than expected and/or were designed for low power APUs. Caching mechanisms the likely culprit as misses burn additional energy. That can be corrected with drivers.
Has anyone actually tested a "midrange" configuration with Vega? Around where that Nano would exist. We've seen the card, but not in any official capacity. Raja did mention not testing dynamic power. With the prices Intel charges for Iris Pro AMD could probably work an oversized Vega into the lineup just to gain share. Up to 64 CUs at ~1GHz without competition. Nvidia can't make an APU and Intel lacks large enough graphics chips. Lower margins, but higher revenue and share gains to establish themselves.