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

Yes that is what I think as well, power efficiency does not appear to be a selling point for these, the 12tflops Titan Xp they are comparing to is calculated based upon the rated clocks which are actually far lower than what it operates at in practice

 

Another overclocker's dream?

 

Do overclockers dream of fires?

 

It gets particularly cringy when you look at one of Raja's answers during March's r/AMD AMA.

> "Extra Headroom"

> 375W TDP



EDIT - For the record, I'm pleased that AMD went balls-to-the-wall on their water-cooled option. I just love how there's always something that makes poor AMD's early claims look sketchy.

 

The TDP numbers are likely just based on the power connectors they have and I think the FP16 usage would be the worst case scenario. The numbers are for the air-cooled version and the only relevant benchmark, since the pro applications are too driver dependant, is the cinebench openGL which in turn isn't reliable at all.

 

They both have dual 8pin power connectors, and even the watercooled version is specced for 1.31tflops on https://www.sabrepc.com/amd-100-506...ooled-16gb-hbc-workstation-graphics-card.html

 

At a glance, the specviewperf scores don't seem so great compared to a Quadro P5000 (although the perf/$ is significantly better). Hopefully that's driver and not HW related...

 

Not really, this performs more or less on par with it and costs 820$.https://www.amazon.com/PNY-NVIDIA-Quadro-Professional-Graphics/dp/B06X9TNDFF

 

So they are expecting the 300W card to overrun somewhat while the 375W card remains just in spec? The numbers look too on the mark to be the real figures.

 

Ouch at the price. Well, I'll wait the "gamer" version, I hope they get a 16gb version too.

 

https://www.scan.co.uk/search?q=frontier
https://www.sabrepc.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=radeon+vega&order=relevance&dir=desc

$1199 / £1139.99 for aircooler, $1799 / £1656.49 for watercooler

 

How sure you exactly are about 5,3 TFLOPS GP104 card performing on par with 13,1 TFLOPS Vega?

 

Check reference scores here. TFLOPS are not the most important thing on the globe of SPECviewperf results.

 

You can also check this April 2017 quadro review and compare against AMD's internal benchmark scores.

 

Maybe we can try to predict the price for the RX Vega cards now?

The full Polaris 10 with 8GB Radeon Pro WX7100 is selling for $620 right now. The consumer gaming equivalent RX580 costs around $250 (currently inflated by the mining craze though). So the consumer version costs around 40% of the Pro version.
So if an aircooled 16GB RX Vega comes out, should we expect around $480? Sounds too low.
If I had to guess, we'll be looking at $400-450 for the 8GB version and $550-600 for the 16GB version (if there is one). Unless the miners screw everything up again, of course.

The table says "Max Board TDP", not average TDP or TBP which is the metric AMD has been using to describe typical power consumption at reference clocks. The clocks and TBP could be exactly the same between the aircooled and watercooled versions (save for the waterpump consumption difference), and the identical TFLOPs and clocks numbers between the two versions seem to suggest exactly that.
This would mean that the higher max board TDP in the watercooled version simply allows for higher power consumption from the board when overclocking, meaning this version brings extra headroom (besides lower noise), exactly as suggested before.

Given AMD's claims on Vega's HBC, I think the extra 8GB will make zero difference in games unless you want play using ridiculous settings like 8K resolution using 8K textures.
There's also the fact that the 4-Hi stacks may be able to clock higher even on reference clocks.
I know if I get a Vega card, I won't be willing to pay a lot more for the extra 8GB VRAM, that's for sure.

The cherrypicked comparison with P4000 is nonsense. That's a card with 8GB VRAM. Whoever builds a system with the Vega Frontier is either an enthusiast with the money to spare or someone who actually needs 16GB VRAM. The market for these two cards doesn't overlap. When 8GB Vega Pro cards come out, then maybe we can make price/performance comparisons with the P4000.
Until then, feel free to make comparisons with the $2500 P5000, which is a card with the same amount of VRAM as the Vega Frontier. I may be faster on some SPECviewperf results at the moment but it also costs twice as much. Perhaps the market for P5000 and Vega Frontier will overlap.

 

In SPECviewperf, the P4000 (cut down GP104) is about equal to 20% faster than Vega FE, P5000 (full GP104) is anywhere between 20~50% faster, and P6000 (full GP102) is anywhere between 50~70% faster! Knowing AMD, they probably picked a bunch of tests where Vega FE is faster than the crippled TitanXp. Considering these results, Vega FE is probably not faster than even crippled TitanXp in the rest of professional benchmarks!

 

Actually, the numbers you are discussing, are the same given by AMD during the FE presentation: nothing more... all we had is a "pre order price" and thats all.. looking like this site wanted show a bit more than just the specifications.

 

So wait, comparing the parts within the same performance envelope is nonsense because end-all-be-all selection criteria is the amount of installed memory? Maybe, and I am just spit-balling here, someone in the market for video card is looking to actually get X performance for Y dollars spent, with frame buffer size being of lesser consideration. I mean, I know historically, we NEVER EVER have compared the performance of GPUs with different memory size, but it's a brave new world out there.

 

Was the "max board TDP" info already available elsewhere, though?
They seem to be the first (and so far only) source to come up with those numbers.

You seem to mistake these as gaming cards, which either the Vega Frontier or the aforementioned Quadros are not.
Amount of installed memory is in fact very important in the workstation market. For example, in content creation systems the user works with uncompressed assets, and running short on VRAM means streaming current data directly from the PCI-Express bus which leads to waiting periods and stuttering (and obvious loss in productivity).
Therefore, the Quadro and Radeon/Fire Pro series are coupled with as much VRAM as possible. It's why a card using a 4 year-old chip with the performance of current $250 consumer cards is still selling for ~$3000 nowadays, and the reason why a 24GB Quadro P6000 costs >3x more than even the prosumer 12GB Titan Xp with the same GP102 chip but higher clocks.

Yes, you are. And the five "roll-eyes" smileys at the end of your post are equally unnecessary for the discussion.

 

Yes, it is important... for SOME users. For tasks where frame buffer size is not an over-riding consideration, absolute performance or price/performance are the primary consideration. To take a single paramenter that is of overriding importance in a subset of all use cases and declare it as the sole correct and proper classification is ridiculous.

But, let's play your game to its logical conclusion:

"The cherrypicked comparison with Titan Xp nonsense. That's a card with 12GB VRAM. Whoever builds a system with the Vega Frontier is either an enthusiast with the money to spare or someone who actually needs 16GB VRAM. The market for these two cards doesn't overlap. When 12GB Vega Pro cards come out, then maybe we can make price/performance comparisons with the Titan Px."