That seems terribly unlikely. We know for a fact that Vega is not a good architecture when it comes to gaming. You think they'll go another 18+ months (until the end of 2020) limping along with Vega?
There also aren't even any rumored Vega products to suggest that's what they'll do. The only thing that hasn't been accounted for is Vega 12, which cropped up early last year, but even then it was thought to be a 12nm part. Some driver code that people found seemed to indicate that it was more likely to be a low-end part and a possible Polaris replacement, but with the release of Polaris 30 (RX 590) that may be an indication that Vega 12 got shelved.
Meanwhile we have references to multiple Navi models showing up in beta versions of MacOS. While that's no guarantee of a release this year, it gives us a glimpse at what AMD's plans are. I think they're content to just ride things out until they can start shipping 7nm Navi products towards mid-year. Turing prices have been high and AMD likely feels confident that consumers won't rush to upgrade. Similarly, they know Vega doesn't offer good value for money, so they won't convince anyone outside of AMD loyalists to buy them.
Yeah, no idea why he thinks Navi won't be til end of 2020 now (or even that Nvidia won't have consumer 7nm GPU til then either). AMD's roadmap says that the next chip
after Navi is due by the end of 2020.
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/12233/gpu_to_2020.jpg
With a planned sampling in Q4 2018, we might expect volume production to be nearer Q2 2019. This means that the next generation of consumer-focused graphics, perhaps using the newer Navi architecture, will be in the mid-2019 timeframe. According to AMD’s roadmaps, it is committed to demonstrating Vega on 7nm, Navi on 7nm, and a ‘next-gen’ design on 7+ before the end of 2020. Obviously there was no clarification on whether that final design is consumer or enterprise focused for 2020. In our recent interview with AMD’s CEO, when asked if the GPU market will at some point have to bifurcate between gaming focused and compute focused designs, Dr. Lisa Su stated that ‘it must be the case’.
Wasn't Vega 12 mobile (going into Macbooks as Vega Pro 20 and 16)?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13532/amds-vega-mobile-lives-vega-pro-20-16-in-november
Still trying to find their one investor call transcript that I remember reading where they said Vega 20 was not for gamers, that Navi would be their first 7nm GPU for gaming market. So far I just saw that they said the Instinct cards were releasing Q4/before end of last year and that those were for enterprise market.
We'll find out soon enough I guess, but I'm expecting that Radeon VII is going to just be a limited run thing and despite what they're now saying, I don't think Vega 20 was meant to be a gaming card. If this was a long term product, I'd have expected it as a Frontier Edition card and for them to offer something for the CAD/render/etc group and professionals who want the compute capability but don't have the budget for Instinct cards, both groups that would have more money (and thus higher margins). Those are people that could benefit from it more as well (due to the memory mostly).
Something weird is going on though. Either Instinct sales are not doing nearly as well as they expected, maybe there was a flaw in some that made them unusable for that market (like it disrupted the end to end ECC or maybe the Deep Learning stuff if its totally separate had more flaws than expected) but fine for gamers. Likely the best scenario is that they just ponied up for some extra wafers as a way to commemorate the one guy retiring, and that costs are low enough that they could do a run of them for gamers and not lose money.
As far as I know, AMD has not actually given us information beyond that most (actually think they said all, but seemingly can't take their previous comments at face value any more) of the Vega 20 chip transistors versus Vega 64 were for Deep Learning compute tasks. They seem to be taking a page out of Nvidia's playbook and not giving us a lot of details about what they've actually done so far. We'll see if that changes any at launch (kinda doubt it, since most of that isn't really for consumers/gamers).
As far as the block diagram it is the exact same between Vega 64 and Vega 20, so they either substantially reworked individual block pieces (that wouldn't show up in the block diagram, so they reworked the NCUs maybe?), or they added something that isn't part of the traditional GPU block and haven't shown us what that is (honestly, at this point I expect its just AMD's version of Tensor Cores).
Vega 64/10:
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/11717/vega10_block_diagram.png
Vega 20:
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13547/1541527170830461274558.jpg
It is not unlikely to assume most of the gpu devs are working on next gen consoles right now. If that is the case then they will make something new based off the console gpu's, which won't happen till after they have finished them, which means to be at least 2020.
That's not to say that something called Navi won't come out this year, but if it does it's unlikely to be the revolutionary new cards AMD needs.
Except that's not how things worked previously, they had dGPU chips/cards out before the consoles that used their designs. Fairly sure the GCN version the One/PS4 were based on came out prior to them, Polaris predated the PS4 Pro, and Vega predated the One X. There were some differences (One X wasn't really Vega, etc), but there hasn't been anything stopping AMD from releasing dGPUs based on the engineering/design work that went into consoles, prior to those consoles launching. I think some of the
No idea what you're saying on that last part. I really hope you weren't expecting some major upheaval in GPU design from Navi. Undoubtedly AMD needs improvements to architecture (or to bolster their software side to actually get the potential out of the stuff they make), but they don't even need that drastic of change to see some good improvements. Just a doubling and shrink of Polaris combined with GDDR6 would be a big step up and quite feasible. That should be able to top Vega 64 and still be quite low power, compact, and cheap. And it sounds like they've reworked things so (reworked the block so that things aren't stuck at the ratio that GCN was) that they can balance the chip more. I think there was like a patent application or something that would seem to indicate that geometry throughput should be up like 50% (from 4 per clock to 6 per clock) or something. Granted they'll probably use that to achieve same throughput with fewer CUs. Unless the compute stuff
FP64 at 2:1 and doubled memory controller?
I don't think those things are that big of changes (heck isn't the FP64 stuff not even actually hardware limitation, its just AMD and Nvidia gimp GPUs for market segmentation? Meaning that its not that they added a bunch to bolster the FP64 performance, rather they're just not gimping it as much like they tend to do on gaming cards these days) that would account for the increased size. But I don't think AMD has said much beyond the extra is targeted at Deep Learning stuff. Kinda wonder if its their own versions of Tensor Cores (or basically achieving the same). I got the feeling that AMD is integrating a lot of the lower precision math stuff into the traditional graphics pipeline in the past, would be curious if they're still doing that (and so kept that the same as Vega 64 so that they wouldn't screw anything up by integrating new stuff in with it) or if they just kept the whole Vega 10 block the same so they could maybe gauge 7nm performance (how much shrink it was enabling them, clock speeds, efficiency, etc).