AMD: Speculation, Rumors, and Discussion (Archive)

Could it be possible that AMD found a last minute issue with P10 that make them have to re-validate their SKUs? Or that they found that P10 have the potential to be in the middle(or higher) between the 1070 and 1080 if they push the frequencies closer to the maximum possible? It just bugs me what AMD is doing..We had have months with news about Polaris, then just smoke and non sense not-presentation. I really don't understand it.

 

Or even possible AMD taken completely by surprise with regard to what Pascal was bringing to the table, and needed time to re-assess the Polaris products in general.

 

Whatever it is, you'll know in less than two weeks.

Again: there's little reason for AMD to rush in with a public response to GP104 because their upcoming two GPUs are just not competing with it.
Polaris 11's success won't be measured through reviews, it'll be measured through the number of design wins in laptops. Polaris 10's success won't be measured by comparing it to the GTX 1070, it'll be done by comparing it to the GTX 970/980.

A knee-jerk reaction to GTX1080's soft (or paper) launch would only make AMD look unnecessarily bad, because all of their new solutions coming in June will perform below GP104. Unless they present a Fiji refresh with unbelievably higher clocks (which is very, very doubtful).

 

I find hard to believe AMD didn't know, with a reasonable error margin, what was coming from NVIDIA, given historical trends and a new process. If Polaris is late (which we don't know for certain) I am more inclined to think they hit some roadblock. Bad yields or some nasty bug that can't be fixed with a driver workaround. The sort of thing that requires a new spin.

 

Why would you expect AMD to change the launch date, the computex launch has been planed for quite some time.

 

Well if they don't launch in June, lets say July- August they launch, GP106 will be out around end of august and beginning of sept (nV has a typical launch of mid range products about 1 Q away from their high end launch)

That doesn't give AMD much time at all.

 

AMD has no lunch date that they stated so far.....

 

The thing is, as I said, that we had have months on pre-presentation and articles about Polaris. then Nvidia lunch its 1080 and AMD is completely silence and made a non-presentation with all the old data already shown like "hey we are here don't forget about us".

I doubt AMD got cough off guard with 1080. Its just a 980Ti with 1700 clocks. As far as we know Polaris should have more a better features than it and it should have a better architecture.(a complete new one vs a refresh one).

 

GCN is a good architecture and I doubt there is so much wrong stuff with it that they need a massively different design.

Marketing pushes this a lot but this myth that new means better than old and proven is, well, a myth

I expect Polaris to be a refinement of the GCN architecture to ease some pain points (slow frontend, perf/power, FB compression, etc..) while retaining most of GCN goodness, similarly to what NVIDIA did with Maxwell.

 

Yes I agreed with you. What I meant was about AMD marketing material that said that most of the architecture have changes on it(all the "new" stuff) and that Pascal have little to none performance improvement over MAxwell, The 980ti is about 18% slower with 15% lower clocks. Would be interesting to see a review of a 1080 down clocked to 980 stock clocks, but I doubt we will see that soon.

 

I don't think design is going to be that much different than what they have now, they will fix some issues but I don't see this is a far step away from the current GCN architectures.

I think they might have gotten caught of guard a little bit, nV was surprised at the clocks themselves (overclocking ability)

And it all depends, if AMD was planning on a summer launch as they stated it would be hard to get them to push it up after the 1080 launch, its pretty close to summer. They did say they will have Polaris out for back to school sales, thats about all the info we have on AMD's launch of Polaris.

 

AMD has officially stated that Polaris would be available for mid 2016 back in early January and they've been sampling the GPUs to OEMs since then, launch has been confirmed for June 1st (which is actually 1 month before the mid of 2016), yet the usual suspects are already chanting their self-pleasuring songs about Polaris' doomed postponement and utter failure.
Launch periods really do summon new forms of.. derp-ness in people, I guess.

That also shows a Pascal Titan in April, NVLink in GP104 and GDDR5X in the GTX 1070, so...

 

When was it officially mentioned the launch is June 1st? It wasn't it was people who thought the Computex announcement is the launch but AMD hasn't stated that yet.

We are two weeks away, do we even know AIB's have chips yet for a launch? I would presume they need about a month to get their stock ready too.... I mean going by the Partner's meet the experts call sounds like they don't.

 

Polaris 11 cards show up on gfxbench.

www.overclock.net/t/1600584/gfxbench-polaris-baffin-67ef-c3-shows-up-on-benchmark-leaderboard

There was another C9xx card shipment, price less than Baffin samples.

 

Miraculously, I actually agree with Tots!
We have zero indications that AMD is late with Polaris. They always stated second half of 2016/back to school.

I do think they didn't expect Nvidia to get to market with consumer Pascal as quickly as they did with prices as low as the 1070, otherwise Raja and Roy wouldn't have been spouting some of the (in hindsight) nonsense that they have about being months ahead and no $300 competition and their fabulous perf/W.

It would be incredibly entertaining to see a GP106 based GPU being released around the same time as Polaris 10. Obviously a bit slower, but with the right amount of price discount, it'd undercut that dumb story about AMD winning due to forgoing higher profits per GPU by increasing market share.

 

This year has been horrible for leaks. At this point I don't think Raja or Jen-Hsun can even order lunch without the other side knowing what it is before it arrives.

 

When did they do that? Haven't seen anything along those lines, rather IMO AMD has blustered and inferred their launch would be sooner rather than later, that they were ahead of NV, spoken about seizing/widening the VR market or whatever, shit like that. And here we are with nothing in the way of specs, prices, dates or any form of information whatsoever.

I agree that this year has been horrible for leaks! We got nothing!

 

They always said mid year. WTH is this second half coming from now?

 

They did say they will have cards for back to school (mobile and low end), think it was CES when they stated that.

But yeah they were pretty confident they were going to come out well before nV, which didn't turn out that way.

I don't know about leaks but AMD's leaks are all over the place.........I would just stick to what AMD have stated so far with their perf/watt to figure out their performance ranges based on a set wattage.

AMD did seem to get blind sided by nV's Pascal launch, even Wallstreet was surprised.

 

Second half starts at mid year. It's not contradictory.
They've stated a couple of times in there conference calls that Polaris would start having financial impact in second half 2016.