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

This is likely going to be the cut-down Navi 21.

No way they'll have a full 80 CU die in large quantities available. Too many defects, hence the full Navi 21 will be an unaffordable RTX 3090 contender only.

 

Understandable and nothing wrong with that. Its when everyone was diving into the specifics that things went amok.

Its natural for consumers to want feature parity as that's how most purchase decisions happen within similar pricing segments, outside of brand-loyalty. AMD has to show and demonstrate a lot on their upcoming products to answer these unknowns.

 

Yes.
IF they are using some kind of large cache to alleviate memory bandwidth pressure, then it also stands to reason that the effectiveness of this approach will vary depending on the title and even specific settings. Which in turn implies that reviewers can probably make it seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread, or a total turd, depending on their choices.

 

60% yield going with known defect rates and rumored die size.

 

All signs point to the numbers not being the top card. Scott Herkelman of AMD even hinted as much in a call to certain publications. It was exactly as Lisa said, a teaser, to show that AMD was back near the high end again. It would defeat the whole purpose of having the October 28th event if they showed all their cards now.

The 3070 is using the same 16 Gbps G6. And no-one is jumping to any conclusions, except those resolutely claiming this absolutely has to be AMD's highest end part.

 

That doen't mean much. Which was top Navi 10 card? 5700XT or 5700XT 50th Anniversary Edition? For Vega it was Vega 64 or Vega 64 Liquid? Technically the limited editions are the top cards, but in practice, it was the other cards that were the top card available to consumers.

3070 uses 14 Gbps, according to the appendix in Ampere white paper: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/...pere-GA102-GPU-Architecture-Whitepaper-V1.pdf

 

For the upcoming Navi launch, what titles are possibly available that have DXR and not specifically Nvidia-only?

 

All RTX games are based on DXR, right ? That was my understanding, hence rdna 2 will provide Ray Tracing in the same games as like turing / ampere..

 

They didn't really show anything?

 

They did exactly what they wanted. Show enough to get people talking about it but not enough to make a conclusion.

 

AMD shipped 7nm 331mm² Vega 20 two years ago (Q4 2018). Why to expect problems with just ~50 % bigger die in Q4 2020?

 

And it was reference only and nowhere to be found and EOLed half a year later. Was this an example of a good product launch which we can use for reference here?

 

With a defect density of 0.09, should be closer to 70% with a 500 mm2 die from what I was able to check quickly.

"There are none so blind as those who will not see"

Because its not by Nvidia, clearly.

The 800mm2 GA100 seems to be available in good quantities does it not? Or do you disagree?

And to state the obvious, expect AMD GPUs to be in short supply anyway. AMD earns more $/mm2 from CPUs than GPUs. You can expect them to prioritize accordingly.

 

Yeah, a biblical quote seems fitting for someone trying to convince someone else about something that doesn't really exist.

 

That could also be influenced by whether all this cache speculation has at least some fraction of truth to it. Storage arrays are going to have redundancy by default, and if much of the area that seems to be in excess of what people expect is memory arrays there's additional tolerance built-in.

 

That's why I underlined rumored. There's an old 505mm2 rumor and the latest 536mm2. Both could turn out to be complete BS.

 

To AMD’s credit their marketing numbers seem quite conservative. They even show a loss to the competition. Who does that!

So I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt that the FPS teaser was reasonably accurate which would mean they have a card that’s very much in 3080 territory.

The only question is whether the 256-bit bus rumor was nonsense.

 

Something for knowledge improvement:

summer:
https://www.fudzilla.com/news/51093-super-micro-installed-at-center-for-scientific-computing
fall:
http://www.wboc.com/story/42647058/...th-amd-mi50-gpu-for-government-and-enterprise
yesterday:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/c...as-its-own-radeon-instinct-mi50-compute-cards