AMD: Navi Speculation, Rumours and Discussion [2019-2020]

[gamervivek]

The thing isn't late'20.

So 2021?



I'm curious as to how well nvidia will clock on 7nm and will it still be Turing? AMD's bigger chip can use some clock improvement like Vega over Polaris, overclocked Turing can do 2.1Ghz, some even going beyond 2.2Ghz. So bigger and later Navi will have to contend with 7nm nvidia chips that can probably do 2.5Ghz.
And of course, will it do 3 SEs and 96 ROPs?

 

[itsmydamnation]

So 2021?



I'm curious as to how well nvidia will clock on 7nm and will it still be Turing? AMD's bigger chip can use some clock improvement like Vega over Polaris, overclocked Turing can do 2.1Ghz, some even going beyond 2.2Ghz. So bigger and later Navi will have to contend with 7nm nvidia chips that can probably do 2.5Ghz.
And of course, will it do 3 SEs and 96 ROPs?

How are NV getting 2.5ghz while no one else on 7nm has got close to that kind of clock speed uplift?
Mobile socs got like 100mhz (4%), Zen 2 is getting like 350mhz (7%) Vega 7 got like 150mhz (11%)
But NV will get 38%.... sure

 

[Alexko]

There are at least 11 decks related to Zen 2 and Navi released 10th June:
3rd_Gen_Ryzen_06102019.pdf
Adrenalin_Edition_2019_06102019.pdf
Game_Developers_06102019.pdf
CPU_Architecture_06102019.pdf
Ryzen_Deep_Dive_06102019.pdf
Radeon_5700_06102019.pdf
Radeon_5000_06102019.pdf
Physical_Design_06102019.pdf
Graphics_Architecture_06102019.pdf
Radeon_Architecture_06102019.pdf
Architecture_06102019.pdf

Can they all be shared with the public?

 

[SimBy]

So 2021?



I'm curious as to how well nvidia will clock on 7nm and will it still be Turing? AMD's bigger chip can use some clock improvement like Vega over Polaris, overclocked Turing can do 2.1Ghz, some even going beyond 2.2Ghz. So bigger and later Navi will have to contend with 7nm nvidia chips that can probably do 2.5Ghz.
And of course, will it do 3 SEs and 96 ROPs?

Intel and Sunny Cove would like to have a word with you There are absolutely no guarantees Nvidia will even match current gen clocks let alone beat them on 7nm. They are also supposedly using Samsung process so an even bigger unknown.

 

[no-X]

Can they all be shared with the public?

I'm not sure. Some of the content is marked "not for redistribution". Anyway, it's 11 decks marked "10th June" and about 3 decks released later. Some of them seems to be outdated, e.g. one slide states that the new Zen 2 MC with the new firmware allowed for DDR4-4400 while another one states that DDR4-5100 was reached or even DDR4-5133. So it's possible, that some of the numbers related to Navi are also more outdated (measured on older drivers) than other ones. Anyway, if you are interested, send me a PM, please. It's a bit OT in this tech-oriented discussion.

 

[keldor]

I'm not sure. Some of the content is marked "not for redistribution". Anyway, it's 11 decks marked "10th June" and about 3 decks released later. Some of them seems to be outdated, e.g. one slide states that the new Zen 2 MC with the new firmware allowed for DDR4-4400 while another one states that DDR4-5100 was reached or even DDR4-5133. So it's possible, that some of the numbers related to Navi are also more outdated (measured on older drivers) than other ones. Anyway, if you are interested, send me a PM, please. It's a bit OT in this tech-oriented discussion.

I wouldn't read too much too much into the memory speed numbers. It's basically overclocking. 4400 is the completely stable value that they feel comfortable making the baseline, and 5100 or 5133 are the maximum levels they achieved, but may not be reachable on every chip, and may not be completely stable.

 

[bridgman]

Nothing called "Arcturus" ever appeared on any AMD roadmap, ever.

Right... Arcturus is a "pick a random star" code name we're using in the Linux drivers for an as-yet-unannounced product.

Using roadmap names in the code made it harder to get approval for early upstreaming.

 

[xEx]

What I find odd, is AMD's misdirection.
It is, as if they are underselling Navi, not piss off the Vega56, Vega64 & Radeon VII owners. It seems RTX2070 doesn't have the steam to keep up. But what AMD is not saying is pretty telling, where are the Navi products @ $199 ~ $299 segment...?

Navi 40 = $450
Navi 36 = $380
Navi 32 = $289
Navi 28 = $199 …?

I don't want to believe it but all indicates that AMD is planning to compete in 2019 with the 470 and 480...Well they call them 570 and 580 since a couple of years ago...Oh well good luck with that AMD.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

So 2021?



I'm curious as to how well nvidia will clock on 7nm and will it still be Turing? AMD's bigger chip can use some clock improvement like Vega over Polaris, overclocked Turing can do 2.1Ghz, some even going beyond 2.2Ghz. So bigger and later Navi will have to contend with 7nm nvidia chips that can probably do 2.5Ghz.
And of course, will it do 3 SEs and 96 ROPs?

I've been able to find all of 2 official GPU roadmaps from AMD, both of which clearly sate "Next Gen" for 2020. Unless that's changed, possible, then whatever next gen is, is still next year
.

The second one appears to be from a year ago, which is to say "next gen" would have to be under development by the time they put this slide out. And a statement "David Wang, senior vp of the Radeon Technologies Group, has explicitly stated that the second generation of RDNA will follow this one, probably next year. The gaming architecture roadmap slide indicates that the 7nm+ RDNA 2 design will arrive before 2021… so 2020, then." Source

Another, CPU slide, also states Zen 3 as coming next year, on TSMC 7nm+ which backs up the 7nm+ process advance.

Edit- This one appears to be official, and seems to be from a week ago. I can't explicitly state how to read the timeline of this chart. My initial guess is "2021" at the end mean the start of 2021, and "next gen" is before the start, and thus RDNA2 is next year. But does is that the correct way to read it? I don't know, it's a chart, the other charts end with 2020. Does that mean Navi was delayed? That RDNA 2 is 2021? But then the charts have those GPUs going into the year while this ones before it? Frack if I know for sure, but it does reiterate the 7nm+ process node.

 

[no-X]

Frenetic Pony: The new roadmaps from E3 change "2020" to "2021" (for both GPUs and CPUs) and "next gen" to "RDNA 2, 7nm+".

 

[JoeJ]

GFX 10.11/12 have so many low precision dot instructions, much more than Vega 20 I wonder what they use it for?

Sounds they have tensor core alike functionality?
Maybe FidelityFX uses those instructions, and they will help a lot with DirectML.

Prepare for an upscaled future. You want 4K or even 8K? You deserve the cheating, haha

 

[bbot]

Right... Arcturus is a "pick a random star" code name we're using in the Linux drivers for an as-yet-unannounced product.

Using roadmap names in the code made it harder to get approval for early upstreaming.

Navi 20?

 

[Deleted member 90741]

And here they are

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f...pu/amdgpu_drv.c?h=amd-staging-drm-next-navi10

{0x1002, 0x7310, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, CHIP_NAVI10},
{0x1002, 0x7312, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, CHIP_NAVI10},
{0x1002, 0x7318, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, CHIP_NAVI10},
{0x1002, 0x7319, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, CHIP_NAVI10},
{0x1002, 0x731A, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, CHIP_NAVI10},
{0x1002, 0x731B, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, CHIP_NAVI10},
{0x1002, 0x731F, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID, 0, 0, CHIP_NAVI10},

 

[Ryan Smith]

Can they all be shared with the public?

Yes, they can. I've put them all up as galleries on AnandTech: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14528/amd-announces-radeon-rx-5700-xt-rx-5700-series/3

Edit- This one appears to be official, and seems to be from a week ago. I can't explicitly state how to read the timeline of this chart. My initial guess is "2021" at the end mean the start of 2021, and "next gen" is before the start, and thus RDNA2 is next year. But does is that the correct way to read it? I don't know, it's a chart, the other charts end with 2020. Does that mean Navi was delayed? That RDNA 2 is 2021? But then the charts have those GPUs going into the year while this ones before it? Frack if I know for sure, but it does reiterate the 7nm+ process node.

Unless otherwise noted, you should consider dates in roadmap slides to be inclusive. So AMD is saying that RDNA 2 will come out by the end of 2021.

 

[3dilettante]

GFX 10.11/12 have so many low precision dot instructions, much more than Vega 20 I wonder what they use it for?

There's the operations consistent with the original set from Vega, and then the new ones are either new combinations of source data type, source precision, accumulator type, accumulator precision, and some kind of instruction behavior change since their opcodes are named slightly differently.

Yes, they can. I've put them all up as galleries on AnandTech: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14528/amd-announces-radeon-rx-5700-xt-rx-5700-series/3

Small question about how to interpret the mentions of primitive shaders in the geometry pipeline. Would you interpret the "4 Prim shader out, 8 Prim shader in" line to mean that there's up to 4 primitive shader invocations being able to submit triangles to the rasterizer, and then 4 (or 8?) more that can continue on culling in parallel?
That seems like it fits the idea of a primitive shader more so than interpreting it as 4 triangles being submitted and only 8 triangles being culled, given that Vega's marketing had a primitive shader being able to cull many times more triangles than could be submitted.

 

[Rootax]

That's the thing, the Vega PS was just that, marketing.

 

[3dilettante]

That's the thing, the Vega PS was just that, marketing.

Even if it's marketing, there's a conceptual mechanism for culling many more triangles.
Using SIMD hardware appropriately, you can evaluate more than triangles per cycle than just two.
The pre-existing use of compute shaders as triangle sieves by game devs can do far more than two triangles per cycle per wavefront, so the culling portion of a primitive shader should have the same opportunity for culling beyond 2 triangles/clock.

 

[del42sa]

Unless otherwise noted, you should consider dates in roadmap slides to be inclusive. So AMD is saying that RDNA 2 will come out by the end of 2021.

So yet another slip in schedule, well well...... That´s not good news.

 

[DmitryKo]

My initial guess is "2021" at the end mean the start of 2021, and "next gen" is before the start, and thus RDNA2 is next year. But does is that the correct way to read it? I don't know, it's a chart, the other charts end with 2020. Does that mean Navi was delayed? That RDNA 2 is 2021?

In my interpretation the labels mark a start of the year, so RDNA2 is somewhere around the second part of 2020.

The common convention for a timescale chart is to indicate either the start point of a time period or the middle point, but never the end point. A timescale that goes from "start of 2017 till end of 2021" would be unconventional.

For all we know, Navi was indeed delayed by turbulent changes in high-performance 7 nm roadmaps.

AMD is saying that RDNA 2 will come out by the end of 2021.

I thought it was supposed to come by the end of 2020, along with PS5 and Xbox "Scarlett" APU parts - that would be "next gen RDNA - hardware raytracing" on the slides.

 

[yuri]

So yet another slip in schedule, well well...... That´s not good news.

Well, given Zen3 also got delayed to 2021 it's safe to assume the root cause is a TSMC 7+nm availability delay.

It's happened may times in the past - overly optimistic foundry roadmaps being "adjusted" to reality.