Do AMD's advances in the CPU world mean anything for their video card business...???

[Caveman]

Can they leverage their new advances into their Video cards to be competitive with Nvidia?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Not sure what you mean, but if you mean techwise... Maybe. There are reports that AMD has moved some engineering muscle from the CPU side to the GPU side of the business for their next major arch Navi.

What and how these engineers can bring over from the Zen project to Navi specifically, I cannot say.

In terms of brand image and marketing, the assist from a competitive CPU side cannot be understated. It will almost certainly help in some capacity, even if it means more AMD prebuilts with integrated or low end AMD GPUs moving.

 

[PeterScott]

Can they leverage their new advances into their Video cards to be competitive with Nvidia?

Not really. The advances in Ryzen are mainly improving the architecture of their x86 CPU significantly to near parity with Intels x86 cores. Most of the rest is simply giving you more cores/$ than Intel.

This helps in building awesome APUs.

But has nothing at all to do with standalone GPU cards.

AMD is in need of an architecture upgrade on the GPU side. AMD tend to have comparable brute force performance to NVidia GPUs, but NVidia has more effective efficiency improvements like Triangle/Vertex culling. Something people were expecting to improve on VEGA with DSBR, but never actually materialized.

 

[Mopetar]

Probably not directly, but having a profitable CPU line means they'll have more money to invest in R&D.

 

[maddie]

I would say definitely Yes.

Some here often think of GPU design as architecture, or some such high level framework. The truth is that while architecture is very important, gains at the lowest level are often critical. Circuitry, transistor tweaking, power control and numerous others. As an example, Nvidia can operate at lower voltages than AMD. This probably has little to do with the macro design layout, but the very low level details.

AMD CPU engineers will have gained a lot of knowledge in designing Zen and this low level expertise is directly applicable to the GPU division. This can work both ways as a few years ago, the GPU division enabled the CPU division to reduce the traditional size of the metal layers in the APU allowing a large increase in density.

 

[Hans Gruber]

AMD bought ATI which is AMD graphics cards today. They have been making GPU's longer than Nvidia has been in business.

 

[Headfoot]

Definitely, I think advances on the power gating (DVFS) and communication fabrics ("Infinity Fabric") will absolutely make their way into GPUs going forward

I suspect we will see something happen on the APU/Console front with CPU-to-GPU communication using that new Rome IO-Die strategy which seems highly promising.