The "Wheres Vega Mobile" comes from AMD Showing Vega Mobile in February, and telling us it's coming. But it never showed up. They even held it up to get photographed. It's the small one shown here:
Intel got a GPU chip from AMD for Kaby Lake G of similar size., and now there is a console chip. Both of which have GPU sections similar size to Vega Mobile. But still no sign of Vega Mobile.
So I was wondering, where is that thing that AMD showed us at the beginning of the year and forgotten. So instead we get designs for third parties.
That is why I was openly wondering where Vega Mobile is. This APU was not specifically a mobile part, but it was reminder that AMD is building similar size GPU sections for other people, but doesn't have one for sale.
Since asking I have speculated, that it is simply too expensive to be competitive with current HBM/Interposer costs.
No, I get that. I just don't get why that keeps getting brought up with this product. Its a completely different chip, for a different market with different parameters. Wondering where mobile Vega is has nothing to do with this chip.
Intel's chips isn't Vega though, its actually Polaris. Again a completely different product (and that seemingly was in the works for some time, there were rumors about it what, back around Polaris launch?).
I agree with that last bit. Its very probably too expensive and AMD isn't willing to take a loss on it to make it worthwhile to use, so no one is going to use it when they can use superior products from Nvidia in that market. AMD isn't going to announce that they have basically no market for it though. Its like wondering why current consumer Tegra chips (the Switch is using the older one that is what almost 3 years old at this point?) are practically nowhere to be seen. But in a way they can't not make those chips as that will definitely make sure there's no market for them. So they announce them, and then just let the market dictate if they actually get used. It certainly speaks that there's something up, that speaks to other issues (Nvidia seems to want high margins or something that puts them out of contention in mobile when there's an abundance of alternatives; dGPU consumer Vega is a dud as its tied to HBM2/interposer which makes it too costly for the performance, let alone perf/W to use - which is sad since a point of HBM is that it was supposed to help make the GPU package smaller and more efficient).
That’s a possibility, but I think the easier explanation is that mobile Vega doesn’t really have a reason to exist. The performance per watt favors NVidia too much to justify a discreet mobile part. That it likely wouldn’t be cost competitive either means AMD is better off devoting manufacturing capacity to other chips that will sell in quantity and at good margins.
Right. Even if AMD makes them, there probably just isn't a market for them. I have a hunch we'll see them update that Intel GPU with the Vega mobile chip at CES or something. But that's probably the only place that chip makes any sense to use, and that's only because the product stack already exists otherwise it wouldn't (actually I don't know that it makes sense then even, its just that people that really want one of those Skull Trail NUCs and maybe some laptops, but even then I don't know that it makes sense compared to other ones with dGPU from Nvidia).
I'm not sure there would be a point to Vega Mobile compared to a dedicated CPU + a 1050 Ti or a 1060 Max Q. Why would the open laptop market support this? And if the new generation offers even better performance per watt then forget it.
For a console it makes much more sense. Though I wonder how it compared to the Polaris APUs in the PS4 Pro and Xbone X in terms of manufacturing cost. Though even it has less compute power just having Zen instead of Jaguar makes it better obviously.
Yeah. The thing is, AMD has to show they're still making mobile dGPUs otherwise companies are going to stop even considering using them (more than they have).
It can't cost too much because the deal was only for like ~$60 million, and its an APU pairing Zen with Vega. I think it shows that HBM2 and the interposer just is not fiscally feasible for consumer stuff yet. That's why I can't figure out why AMD didn't do a dGPU of Vega with GDDR5X. That should have let them get to $349 or $399 and compete with the 1070 (clock it more conservatively so that its in the sweet spot of efficiency, so that the performance against the 1070 would be better, while keeping the efficiency better). I think they probably just had too much else going on and didn't have the resources (although I wonder how much it would have taken, but maybe it would have required a new chip with GDDR memory controllers - although I thought they said it could support either, but maybe they didn't include them on the Vega chips they made, or fused them off or something; I wonder if there weren't enough memory controllers so it would've been stuck at like 256bit so it would've been bandwidth starved too without redoing the chip for more memory controllers). Now, I think that is a better question, why didn't they do that instead of Vega mobile, since there would at least have been a market for it. It'd be a good pairing of that card with Ryzen 2xxx series for OEMs.
The reports that they've focused so much resources on Navi means it'll be really interesting to see how that turns out. Those reports also have been weirdly negative in calling it a lower end/consumer level chip, although, I believe that was always the point of it (with it starting AMD trying on card mGPU solutions where they appear/function similar to a similar size single monolithic die), and that's where AMD has made their money in dGPUs for years, so I think that's prudent anyway. But since it also is reported they've tailored it heavily to what Sony wants for the Playstation, it will be interesting to see how it turns out and if it does attempt the mGPU die strategy. That might have gone out the window if HBM was supposed to be a key part of that, and its cost/complexity makes it unfeasible for consumer stuff.