News AMD Announces Radeon VII

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Ajay

Lifer
Jan 8, 2001
15,332
7,792
136
Yup, turns out sometimes waiting for the actual news is a good idea.

"These products, in turn will be able to access certain professional features of the Radeon Pro drivers, but lack the all-critical certifications and optimizations that typically set the Pro drivers apart."

Well, that seals it for a lot professional workstation users.
 

Ajay

Lifer
Jan 8, 2001
15,332
7,792
136
They needed a 7nm GPU for CES. The most recent rumors are suggesting that Navi won't launch until October/November instead of June/July, so it may have more issues than initially thought. Some rumors suggested that they were only going to ship 20k Radeon VII GPUs at most, so it's just a matter of how much they value any publicity they get from releasing it as opposed to the value they could have from selling the cards as MI50 products.
Fair point on garnering publicity. It does seem like Vega 20 good die count is on the low end - no wonder Nvidia is holding off. That situation will likely improve significantly over the next six months, unless TSMC is really tight on capacity. I would prefer to see some more solid evidence on Navi's release date - Lisa Su said nothing about timetables at her CES presentation.
 

Stuka87

Diamond Member
Dec 10, 2010
6,240
2,559
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Fair point on garnering publicity. It does seem like Vega 20 good die count is on the low end - no wonder Nvidia is holding off. That situation will likely improve significantly over the next six months, unless TSMC is really tight on capacity. I would prefer to see some more solid evidence on Navi's release date - Lisa Su said nothing about timetables at her CES presentation.

Thats because she talked about it during the earnings call which came after CES.

"I think on the gaming side from what we are seeing, we did see sell out increase in Q4 versus Q3. So gamers are still buying GPUs. They may be more discerning about price points. And so I can imagine that there might be a bit more softness at the high end versus in the mid range. But we believe that we have a good understanding of what's happening in the gaming side of the business, and it will be driven. Our gaming growth will be driven by new products. We would see that as we go through this year and with our Radeon 7 launch, as well as our Navi launches on the gaming side."
 

Veradun

Senior member
Jul 29, 2016
564
780
136
Fair point on garnering publicity. It does seem like Vega 20 good die count is on the low end - no wonder Nvidia is holding off. That situation will likely improve significantly over the next six months, unless TSMC is really tight on capacity. I would prefer to see some more solid evidence on Navi's release date - Lisa Su said nothing about timetables at her CES presentation.

TSMC is about to start HVM of EUV 7nm (a.k.a. 2nd gen 7nm a.k.a. 7FF+), so I have some doubts about yelds being so tragic on the current edge node.

BTW Vega20 has been developed with only TTM in mind, to accelerate in the datacenter space that is a fast growing market and always avid of more raw performance. Navi will certainly be far more optimized on the process and it will show in every metric ;)
 
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zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
110,511
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That's the headline that the article ran with. I don't think this has much of anything to do with ray tracing. It is free media coverage though.



Availability, since if you can't buy a Radeon VII if they're all sold out and AMD doesn't make any more of them.



They needed a 7nm GPU for CES. The most recent rumors are suggesting that Navi won't launch until October/November instead of June/July, so it may have more issues than initially thought. Some rumors suggested that they were only going to ship 20k Radeon VII GPUs at most, so it's just a matter of how much they value any publicity they get from releasing it as opposed to the value they could have from selling the cards as MI50 products.

is Vega 20 the first 7nm chip from AMD and TSMC? Seems like this was a limited run (if not just a selection of chips for MI60 or whatever) just to work out kinks with their new 7nm partner before dedicating capacity to Zen 2 and Pro Vega 20 needs. Is it possible to learn anything about the process and translate that from GPU wafers to what you would expect with CPUs?
 
Mar 11, 2004
23,031
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is Vega 20 the first 7nm chip from AMD and TSMC? Seems like this was a limited run (if not just a selection of chips for MI60 or whatever) just to work out kinks with their new 7nm partner before dedicating capacity to Zen 2 and Pro Vega 20 needs. Is it possible to learn anything about the process and translate that from GPU wafers to what you would expect with CPUs?

Well its AMD's first 7nm chip, and probably the largest that TSMC has produced on 7nm. We'll see. I don't think Vega 20 is a limited production chip, but I'm not sure how much it'll be sold to consumers, especially since Navi is purported to be close in performance to it (while likely costing a lot less). Yes and no. At stock, I wouldn't read much into things, but if it can hit 1800MHz at 1V consistently, that would show that there's solid perf/W improvement. But certainly a CPU die that is what 1/3-1/4 the size, with much different clock speeds (i.e. CPU doing 4-5GHz, compared to not even 2GHz on GPU), well not sure how much you can infer other than general idea of what improvements relative to previous similar products (so how did Vega 20 compare to Vega 10).

IIRC, the EUV part is not true. Digitimes was wrong/got confused.

Yeah, I'm skeptical that EUV is going to be doing high volume this soon.
 

Veradun

Senior member
Jul 29, 2016
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780
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We'll they've been saying they plan to start risk production for 5nm this year for ages now, and I don't think they would start that without having 7FF+ in HVM.
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
14,509
5,159
136
We'll they've been saying they plan to start risk production for 5nm this year for ages now, and I don't think they would start that without having 7FF+ in HVM.

Actually I think 7FF+ already went "HVM" some time back, but nobody is using it just yet because they are still working out EUV. It's confusing yes.

From a practical POV, both 7FF+ and 5 sound like they are coming out at the same time (in 2020); and 7FF+ is geared towards companies who wanted to update their 7 nm designs without spending what it would take to port to 5.
 

Veradun

Senior member
Jul 29, 2016
564
780
136
Actually I think 7FF+ already went "HVM" some time back, but nobody is using it just yet because they are still working out EUV. It's confusing yes.

wut?

If they're working out it then it's in development or early risk production. Being HVM means they're ok with the process, and while you can improve it during HVM (see 14, 14+, 14++, 14+++ from Intel) the process at that stage is yelding and good.
 

railven

Diamond Member
Mar 25, 2010
6,604
561
126
<nervously looks into his case> I wish my desk was real wood so I could knock on it. :/

And there goes the ghost. Welps, let's see if I can RMA this thing (first time I'll have to warranty something I removed the stock cooler on :/ ) or if I learned a valuable lesson.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,582
10,785
136
Managed to snag a XFX-branded Radeon VII at Newegg today.

I bought it mainly for the FP64 compute (3.46 TFLOPs i.e. 1/2 of MI50) but I suppose I can do some other testing (especially undervolting).

Nice! It's hard to get these things. Are you planning to do your testing under Linux?

And there goes the ghost. Welps, let's see if I can RMA this thing (first time I'll have to warranty something I removed the stock cooler on :/ ) or if I learned a valuable lesson.

What happened? Did your 2080Ti die? Please tell me it didn't.
 

n0x1ous

Platinum Member
Sep 9, 2010
2,572
248
106
So got my new Radeon VII last night and put it on my test bench.

clean install of windows 10 starts up fine but upon installing 19.2.1 or 19.2.2 windows flashes a message the the display driver could not start and reverts to microsoft basic display adapter. Rebooting and checking device manager shows the card but with a yellow exclamation point and says windows stopped this device due to errors code 43.

650W evga psu
2 separate 8 pin power cables to the card

Tried reseating the card, reseating the pcie power cables.

Thoughts? dud card?
 

Hitman928

Diamond Member
Apr 15, 2012
5,177
7,628
136
So got my new Radeon VII last night and put it on my test bench.

clean install of windows 10 starts up fine but upon installing 19.2.1 or 19.2.2 windows flashes a message the the display driver could not start and reverts to microsoft basic display adapter. Rebooting and checking device manager shows the card but with a yellow exclamation point and says windows stopped this device due to errors code 43.

650W evga psu
2 separate 8 pin power cables to the card

Tried reseating the card, reseating the pcie power cables.

Thoughts? dud card?

Sounds like a dud card but possibly not. Did you try running ddu and doing another install? Are you downloading the full driver from AMD or the minimal download where it downloads while it installs?
 
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n0x1ous

Platinum Member
Sep 9, 2010
2,572
248
106
Yeah I'll try the autodownloader tonight. Also will try swapping in a 480 into test bench and then swapping the VII into a different machine.
 

Hitman928

Diamond Member
Apr 15, 2012
5,177
7,628
136
Sounds like a driver problem....

Did you try the default Windows driver ?

I've had a bad card exhibit this exact same behavior. Basically when running 2d mode, it works fine, but with the full drivers it tries to run 3d effects and craps out. Could still be a driver issue, but could be a bad card symptom too.