AMD: Speculation, Rumors, and Discussion (Archive)

Coincidentally, this popped up recently.
http://gpuopen.com/amd-gcn-assembly-cross-lane-operations/

 

Thanks! Just what I was looking for.

 

The RX 460 chip photos state it's made in Taiwan. Is this the package/assembly "made in Taiwan" or where it was diffused?
The GF 14nm RX 480 chips have no marking that I've seen.

 

Packaged probably, IIRC chips which actually say where they're diffused say just that, "Diffused in xyz"

 

The reasons for saying diffused versus something else are unclear to me. The larger GPUs have nothing on them, while the 28nm R9 270 says made in Taiwan.

edit: Is the alphanumeric code below an indicator of where it was fabbed?

 

I thought AMD didnt even have packaging facilities in Taiwan? When they spun off the division, I remember reading that it was in Malaysia.

 

Well GlobalFoundries doesn't have fabs in Malaysia either, so it's far more likely they were just packaged there

 

I'm a bit confused by the memory clocks of RX470 and RX460, 6.6 Gbps and 7 Gbps respectively It's almost as if it should be the other way around.

RX470 - 32 CUs and 211 GB/s - 6.6 GB/s per CU
RX460 - 14 CUs and 112 GB/s - 8 GB/s per CU

Also surprised that RX460 has only 14 CUs enabled. You'd expect yields to be good on the smaller chip. Maybe they're stockpiling all the good chips for mobile (Apple's Kaby Lake refresh)

128 bit DDR4 should actually be a good boost for AMD. Most laptops today ship with 1600 Mhz DDR3/DDR3L, and mostly single channel to boot. I'd expect Raven Ridge to use at least DDR4-2400 so combined with Polaris/Vega b/w optimizations, this should give ~80% higher bandwidth (Provided AMD make sure their OEMs use dual channel memory). Relative to RX460/Polaris 11 this is still quite low though.

 

Yes I know they dont have fabs there, as I said I was referring to the packaging facilities. They spun off the chip assembly, test, mark, and pack (ATMP) operations located in Penang, Malaysia and Suzhou, China. Nothing in Taiwan.

 

TR 460 review is up.
http://techreport.com/review/30488/amd-radeon-rx-460-graphics-card-reviewed

At least for the cards they tested the 460 is slower, louder, more expensive and uses more power than the GTX950? Did not expect this much of a failure tbh. And we haven't even seen GP107 or 108 yet. Yeesh

 

After seeing the incredibly mess up of the 470/80 I expect anything from AMD at this point.

Enviado desde mi HTC One mediante Tapatalk

 

It's really a good match for the GTX 950 in both price and speed... a tie, not an AMD loss. The interesting observation from TR's article is that the 2012 Pitcairn based R7 370 gives slightly better performance than the RX 460 at slightly less cost.

 

I just don't understand were are all the power efficiency improvements gone (what was stated by AMD, yeah they are more efficient then their last gen cards), didn't see it in the 480, in the 470 and now the 460.

 

According to the charts in the conclusion the 950 is slightly faster. As for price yeah it's basically a wash unless you include rebates and free games in which case the 950 is a definite better value. Also how in the absolute hell is the 950 more power efficient!? Even a tie in that measure would be a huge loss, but to actually lose to a 28nm part?!?!?

GP107 will just absolutely demolish P10 in every conceivable measure. At this point AMD is as far behind NV wrt GPUs as they are with Intel and CPUs. I mean seriously it's pathetic. So much for them getting back into the laptop game.

 

Did you actually read the article?
460 vs. 950:
+16% in DOOM (Vulkan)
-9% in DOOM (OGL)
+36% in Hitman (DX12)
+24% in Hitman (DX11)
-2% in RotTR (DX12)
-2% in RotTR (DX11)
-11% in GTA V
-21% in Crysis 3
+3% in The Witcher 3

Much bigger wins than losses and losing in DOOM OGL is pretty much irrelevant when you can play in Vulkan. And why was Crysis 3 chosen to get power measurements? Why not RotTR or The Witcher where the framerates are about the same? Or maybe they could have chosen Hitman DX12 and gotten different results. I don't see any rationale for choosing Crysis 3.

-FUDie

 

I knew the spin was coming but it still shocks me that anyone could see this as anything other than a complete and total failure.

 

Cheaper board costs, from what I've been told. Apparently the difference in cost of assembling a 7Gbps PCB versus a 6.6Gbps PCB are material enough to matter. Also, it helps to further separate 480 from 470, as otherwise the two cards would be even closer in performance.

As for 460, it only has a 128-bit bus to begin with. So it needs all the bandwidth it can get, and the implied higher costs of hitting 7Gbps are tempered by the fact that the bus is half as wide.

 

Errr...
Is Polaris 11 primarily a desktop product at all?
I always perceived it to be meant to be an inexpensive laptop graphics chip, the next step up from the APUs. The desktop incarnation has a quicker path to market, but suffers a bit from AMDs propensity to push the desktop products a bit (IMHO) too high up on the frequency/voltage curve, sacrificing perf/W for modest gains in performance.

We have yet to see how the chip does in its natural environment.

 

Well if you compare it to their 28nm cards its still a pretty good step ahead. Also remember that as a cut down part, the perf/W will be lower than the fully enabled Polaris 11 die. Let's wait and see how that performs. Don't discount the additional features of Polaris either. (DP 1.4, HEVC decoding etc).

Agreed..this should help AMD claw back some share in the laptop space. Kepler and especially Maxwell pretty much pushed them out of the market. And even if they don't match NV, they are closer than the last gen and should keep NV's pricing a bit more honest.

I thought of that actually but expected them to be reusing the RX480 PCB which is rated at 7 Gbps minimum. The product segmentation part is probably true though (The price difference of $20 is still too low IMHO). If you could explore the benefit of memory OC in your review that would be interesting.

That's true and the price is nowhere near half so the impact is less. PS: Please tell AMD that custom/OC RX460 cards at $139 make no sense whatsoever since you can pick up a RX470 with over double the performance for just $40 more. Those wanting a lower power card are anyway going to buy the stock/non 6 pin cards which should be nearer the $109 MSRP.

 

$139 to $180 is almost a 30% increase, which is a lot.
Anyway, this is the pricing of Sapphire AMD 4xx series (Nitro) in my country.
460 4GB $172
470 4GB $232
470 8GB $269
480 4GB $259
480 8GB $320
480 8GB $274 (Powercolor reference 480)
(for reference, the cheapest 1060 I can find is around the same is around the same price as 480 8GB (Zotac). Other 1060 are being sold at a higher price).

difference in prince
460 to 470 4GB -> $60 (35%)
470 4GB to 8GB -> $37 (16%)
480 4GB to 8GB -> $61 (24%)

Basically those that only have budget for 460, then you must really stretch your budget to be able to buy 470.
The premium for 480 8GB is simply too much. Not making any sense.

Anyway, the pricing is really making life difficult. Anyway, if I game in 1080p, is 8GB useful, even for future proofing? Would you still recommend buying a ref 480 8GB (considering its power problem) vs 480 4GB non ref (which probably will perform better than ref).