The question is how much of an uplift can AMD get from a big Navi/Vega 7nm chip?
HOCP just did a series of articles comparing various NVIDIA and AMD GPUs across 15 games, the transition from FuryX with it's limited 4GB RAM and 28nm to Vega 64 with it's 8GB RAM and 16nm only resulted in a 30% uplift. Compare that to a 1080Ti to 980Ti and the uplift is 70%!
It gets worse as you go down in generations, the FuryX is only 20% faster than 390X. While a 980Ti is 46% faster than 780Ti.
Granted NVIDIA's uplift 1080Ti to 2080Ti slowed down, but that's because of 16nm to 12nm transition. We know nothing about their 7nm uplift. And If AMD can repeat a similar 30% uplift with Navi/Vega 7nm this puts them on par with 1080Ti. Leaving the 2080Ti and the 7nm NVIDIA flagship untouchable. AMD badly needs to increase their uplift this round.
Thoughts?
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/09/04/amd_gpu_generational_performance_part_1/1
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/08/07/nvidia_gpu_generational_performance_part_2/17
For what it's worth, I'd expect Navi 10 to have no more CUs than Vega 10, but higher efficiency (i.e. more perf/CU/MHz, but also less power from micro-architectural optimisation), maybe around +10~20%, maybe a bit more, since there's some reason to think that Vega may be a bit buggy, and/or rough around the edges. Then 7nm should bring something like +15~25% on the clockspeed front, so a total of +27~50%. It's hard to say that this is anything more than a guess, though.
All in all that should put it somewhere between the (1080Ti/)2080 and the 2080 Ti, both in terms of performance and, presumably, power. Clearly, that wouldn't be great, but it would be competitive against Pascal/Turing. I have a feeling that AMD will have a few months of 7nm monopoly before NVIDIA responds, so that's something. After that, they'll need real progress on the micro-architecture front, which doesn't seem to be in the pipes for Navi, but might be for whatever comes next.