AMD Vega 10, Vega 11, Vega 12 and Vega 20 Rumors and Discussion

I think AMD can have their cake and eat it too.

AMD can have a presence at $700 and simultaneously be price competitive.

If I were AMD, I'd line things up as follows:

$700 Vega XT

• CLC (and clocks as high as possible)
• Short Fury X-sized PCB (take the compact gpu crown)
• 2 Gbps HBM2 (even if it causes severe supply issues)
• Potentially >250W TDP (no need to jive with OEM cooling standards if you're already violating them with a clc)
• No custom cards (just like Fury X)

$600 Vega XT

• Air cooled (with more reasonable clocks)
• ~1.6 Gbps HBM2 (assuming supply issues w/2 Gbps)
• <=250W TDP (make OEMs happy)
• Custom cards allowed (maybe even save R&D $ with no reference card, a la Fury)

$450 Vega Pro

• Air cooled (with the lowest clocks, relatively)
• 1.6 Gbps HBM2
• <=250W TDP (make OEMs happy)
• Custom cards allowed (maybe even save R&D $ with no reference card, a la Fury)

Do it that way and you get several things going right for AMD:

• Proper price discrimination of AMD fanboys (market segmentation matters, detestable as it might feel)
• A legitimate "halo" card to gain back some mindshare from Nvidia (even if it can't be kept in stock)
• The small form factor desktop performance crown
• Undercutting price on both 1080 Ti and 1080
• Efficient use of HBM2 supply (in case rumors of 2 Gbps shortages are true)
• Potentially only one reference design (R&D is tight at AMD)

 

http://wccftech.com/amd-dual-gpu-vega-liquid-cooled-graphics-card-spotted-in-linux-drivers/

 

http://wccftech.com/amd-vega-10-3dm...c1-device-8gb-700mhz-vram-1200mhz-core-clock/

 

^^

Except the accelerators are passively cooled not because Vega can confortably reach past 1.55 Ghz, but because this is the way to install Gpu accelerators in a rack. The airflow there will be far and above anyone of us has in their cases ( I hope at least.. for neighbours' sake)

 

This is a point worth emphasizing, because of the prevalence of "Vega 1.55GHz on AIR, 2GHz consumer cards & Half-Life 3 confirmed!!1" sentiment on certain websites. These accelerators (which includes P100, also passively cooled) simply shift burden of generating sufficient airflow onto rack's cooling system.

 

The use of the word passive seems to evoke a different image for consumers versus server racks, although it's true that generally even fanless solutions in a desktop are often relying at least a little on case/PSU fans for decent results. It seems like the level of obligatory air flow could in some way be used to distinguish one from the other.

 

TDP/power consumption is a far more useful metric in this respect.

 

The issue for me is that someone from wccftech staff made this confusion.

 

That would be my guess. It's also possible the low cost implies not using an interposer, but within the package to decrease form factor. Ideally as a replacement for DIMMs which we haven't really seen yet.

 

I doubt it's confusion. They will take anything from anywhere to make a click-bait "article" from it, irrespective of its source or validity.

 

we have no idea what that chip actually is. New features may not be working on it , drivers may not expose new features and so on. I will wait another 2 weeks at this point itsn ot much of a wait

 

Yes, and according to AMD the TDP on Instinct MI25 is < 300W, so same envelope as Tesla P100 and Tesla V100 (which will ship in Q3)

http://instinct.radeon.com/en-us/about/

 

Yes but well probably only the investment in the design of volta was higher than the R&D of AMD. that chip is really a statement from Nvidia kind of the f40 from Ferrari in its days.

 

Seems like 300W is just fairly vague envelope. If this image is legitimate then Vega 10 is 12TF @ 225W

https://videocardz.com/65521/amd-vega-10-and-vega-20-slides-revealed

The extra +0.5TF shouldn't need an extra ~75W of power.

 

Do not confuse maximum throughput and sustained throughput at maximum load. The gap between those two metrics is becoming the most important metric.

 

thoses Tflops are only calculated by mhz x shaders ... This said AMD have a nice efficiency on computing ... ( i mean computing as not gaming ).. if you have 12Tflops, efficiency is nearly at 11.99Tflops (OpenCL, Directcompute etc. )..

Ofc, theres the question of turbo mode.. is the clock are sustained at max level ? or not ? cooling enter too in question... now.. for be honest, in computing mode, if shaders are used at 100%, other parts of the gpus are idle, so it is not really as in gaming.

GCN 1 was allready absolutely amazing in term of efficiency for this.. 4 Tflops max base mean nearly 4 Tflops of sustained throughput.

 

FWIW, golem.de claims, that the interposer is indeed two separte ones.
https://www.golem.de/news/nvidias-g...mit-des-technisch-moeglichen-1705-127773.html
The relevant passage for your google translate pleasure:
"Der Interposer, auf welchem der GV100 und die vier HDM2-Speicherstapel sitzen, sprengt die Dimensionen der Maske (Reticle), weshalb zwei benötigt werden."
Or, if you take my (deliberately literal) word for it:
"The Interposer on which the GV100 and the four HDM2-stacks sit, blows the dimensions of the reticle so that two are required."
From the grammatical structure, two would refer to reticles. It could be a a word omission though:
-> "…weshalb zwei Belichtungsdurchgänge benötigt werden."
-> "… so that two exposures are required".

 

Of course I was refererring to the turbo mode, hence "maximum load".

Another interesting question to ponder would be, when Nvidia (or AMD, for that matter) sees the HPC/AI market as sufficiently large enough for the **100 chips to no longer require graphics specific assets like rasterizers and texture mapping units. GP100 already has not seen much use outside of professional products, mainly Tesla and a bit of Quadro. At least the TMUs are still part of GV100 and since it is partitioned in GPCs, it seems like a safe bet that the rasterizer parts are still on board as well.