Next Gen AMD GPU's - 7nm VEGA refresh & AMD 600 series Project "Zen"

So, next gen GPU’s seem to be getting closer.

First there is the 7nm VEGA refresh that will not be us regular users, maybe the Pro market? We’ll see how that develops.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12233/amd-tech-day-at-ces-2018-roadmap-revealed-with-ryzen-apus-zen-on-12nm-vega-on-7nm/9

And recently there is the AMD 600 Series GPU Project “Zen”

Lets discuss both :slight_smile:

There was an article where Lisa Su (AMD’s CEO) put the hammer down on the Radeon team and told them she wants to see results of the new effort this year.

Right now, AMD’s GPU line is finding it difficult to compete against Nvidia, but the ‘Zen’ project repeats the rumors heard for months (and that is future Radeon cards will be boosted by the same tech. that allowed the company to re-emerge as a serious player in the CPU market). If they can lower their costs using it and offer a Navi GPU with GTX 1080 speeds at only a third of the price, gamers could find it more practical to just get two of them instead of one (very pricey) high-end Nvidia card.

They don’t have to be the fastest but they have to be fast. Just for gaming and freesync they would be ahead. They need quantity of cards out there to get the attention of devs to utilize amd cards.

The new Samsung TVs use (VRR)freesync. Xbox One X uses freesync. Next playstation would add it probably. Games are well optimized for consoles because every system is the same.

I just hope AMD don’t do a 3DFX. My young heart was a bit dead inside when 3DFX went under.

AMD don’t believe in creating giant chips with low yeilds, so I don’t expect them to ever beat Nvidia top end. However, I can see them dominating the low, mid, low-high end. If they can get multi-gpu chips to talk efficiently on one die, they can take the top end and make everything substantially cheaper. Well see at the end of the year if the Zen team can turn Radeon around.

BTW, did anyone see this ad?

Honestly I hope that AMD does not go one monolithic approach. they could use the same approach as with Threadriper/Epyc, using an interposer or some other way of connecting smaller cores. And bypass XFire issue alltogether.

Still I’m happy with my Vega and freesync screen.

I’m happy how Lisa put the hammer down with Zen approach. Now to see how this develops.

There’s always the ethical argument for buying Radeon, but ethical concerns and shady practices didn’t stop people from buying Intel when AMD’s best chips were about 50 percent weaker than the i7’s. People will choose factors like performance, power consumption, and heat first and will consider ethics if the alternative is competitive (like AMD is now with Ryzen and Ryzen+).

Right now, Nvidia appears to be the better choice, but I keep seeing potential pros and cons. to what Nvidia and AMD has out there now.

Nvidia - You get top performing cards that produce less heat and need less energy. They also tend to have somewhat better drivers.
AMD - You might get a performance boost paired with a Ryzen, and AMD cards supposedly have a better long-term viability record. AMD has reworked its graphics division and may result in benefits to existing owners down the line. AMD also might bring better performance with Vulkan (which is where graphics are likely going to transition to in the coming years).

… I’m beyond confused by your “Ethical argument” about AMD Radeon.

Nviida has introduced GPP, so if you want to look at GPU company without much ethics i think you are a bit confused.

As for performace I fully agree, that Nvidia for gaming is in front.

For Compute, AMD GPU’s have always been ahead, hence their popularity by cryptominers. For GPU rendering, Blender’s official benchmarks show AMD ahead of GTX 1080ti and slightly behind the GTX Titan Xp.

http://download.blender.org/institute/benchmark/latest_snapshot.html

What is GPP? Maybe you mean GPGPU or GPGP?
Nvidia did not introduce general purpose programming on gpu, it just created a proprietary framework and pushed it very hard everywhere.

Nvidia introduce a new business practice call GeForce Partnership Program (GPP). To sign up with Nvidia and sell only Nvidia cards with the manufacturers game brand. In exchange, they will give you more allocated gpus for sale, exclusive early access to hardware to get manufacturing prototype going earlier, help to make your gpus better. It’s a way to setup a monolopy and prevent vendors from selling AMD cards.

This is pretty similar to Intel giving Dell a discount to sell Intel cpu exclusively. AMD sued, and won a few billion dollars, but a lot of damage was done to AMD cpu R&D department and kept them behind the tech curve for a few years. That is why we only get 4 cores for the last few years with only 5% growth every year. Some say Intel did this anyway, knowing they will get sued and fined, just to stifle AMD growth and competition.

I think some of the information regarding GPP may actually be tainted by emotion. The companies that signed on are creating new brands that are exclusive to AMD (as it only locks in brands and not the vendor’s entire product line).

Of course, this could also mean a PC vendor only offering machines containing Nvidia cards, but Dell and HP have already set a precedent by saying no thanks to the program.

The FTC and EU are looking into it now. I think that means it is closer to an anti competitive practice. The new brands that these manufactorers are offering AMD are definitely much weaker than taking establish brands that took years to build up. If Nvidia was behind in marketshare, it wouldn’t be an issue, but it does looks like they are using their leading market position to force out AMD.

AMD is also going to have to crack that nut that is Nvidia’s rabid fanbase (they are not going to peel away to their side unless they come out with GPU’s that absolutely smash anything Nvidia has to offer).

These include the type of people who will spend a dump-truck of money on a quad-SLI setup using the highest end cards, and then repeat the process with the next generation of cards. They also want Nvidia to become a monopoly in the GPU market (so in a weird way, the company could just be trying to do what they wish to see).

And going back to the GPU side of things. Powercolor showed VEGA NANO :slight_smile: Though doubt they’ll release it…

Thoughts?

Would be super nice if they undervolted it to keep it cool and silent. AMD card have way to high voltage for their own good just to compete with nVidia. Then a VEGA Nano makes sense.

Well the funny part is that if you take regular Vega, and use the secondary bios along with Wattsman profile for power efficient, the GPU drops to 165W … so it is already build in current ones. Will try to locate a review that shows the different power profiles and impact they have.

This shows that at least in games (or at least the single one they tested) there wasn’t a major drop, yet very nice power drop

And here is a more complete set of games tested. Can’t find any Compute tests :frowning:

From what I see, Nvidia Pascal is the best architecture for GPU’s right now when it comes to specs. (particularly the balance between power consumption, heat generation, and performance)

My new build has me switching back to Nvidia for those reasons, but I personally leave the possibility of flipping again to AMD once they “Zen” Radeon and (hopefully) bring in a new arch. with the smart technologies developed for Ryzen (infinity fabric, precision boost, ect…).

Agreed. Ignoring morality of Nvidia, their GPU’s are the best of the best for most tasks. Gaming and power usage is impressive.

Computing AMD and Nvidia is on par (Vega 64 slightly behind GTX 1080TI), but again as you sated, GTX is ahead on the power usage aspect. http://download.blender.org/institute/benchmark/latest_snapshot.html

As I invested in Freesync Screen for gaming purposes, i’m fine with what AMD is offering.

Still like you Ace, I’m very eager to see what Zen Radeon will bring to the table.

We can agree on that, my new build in fact is going to switch me to AMD for the CPU this time, because Ryzen actually does have some clear advantages vs. the competition (especially in multi-core operations like rendering) :slight_smile:

Besides that, all of the tech. news in the last couple of months seem to have Vega mainly finding success as an integrated graphics solution (which could still put pressure on Nvidia as the market for their lower-end models shrink).