Radeon Vega Architecture Preview Thread

[William Gaatjes]

Well, if the drum represents a single gpu, then a warehouse full of them would imply stock sufficient for a release is available now. Given Vega has been announced and publicly demo'd already ...at the New Horizon event ...then why would AMD be counting down to 'just' another announcement?

Still, the hype train doesn't need any more fuel, least of all from me!

It is always good practice to wait a few months until the always present bugs in software and hardware designs are solved.
If you look at the history like bios updates, heatsink issues, high prices because of high demand.
All AIB partners always have something that is an issue.

edit:
And then i have not even mentioned preliminary driver issues from for example Nvidia and AMD.

 

[zinfamous]

It is always good practice to wait a few months until the always present bugs in software and hardware designs are solved.
If you look at the history like bios updates, heatsink issues, high prices because of high demand.
All AIB partners always have something that is an issue.

Yup, I expect ~May to be the most optimistic purchase time for a "known" Vega lineup that offers choice and common availability.

 

[Bacon1]

It's explained well in the reddit thread the image is from

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5lqale/vega_vs_gcn_architecture_in_pictures/

 

[tential]

I'm more concerned about whether they are replacing Polaris 10. Reason being, I have just ordered an RX 480 4GB, and it gets delivered tomorrow. Should I return it and wait for Vega?

Budget won't stretch for anything that has GDDR5X or HDM2.

If you're willing to get a 4gb 480 vs an 8gb 480 you don't need to pay attention to Vega or anything. Just enjoy your card .

Vega is for high end customers

 

[William Gaatjes]

I'm more concerned about whether they are replacing Polaris 10. Reason being, I have just ordered an RX 480 4GB, and it gets delivered tomorrow. Should I return it and wait for Vega?

Budget won't stretch for anything that has GDDR5X or HDM2.

It is better to go for the 8GB. Clever game engine developers find ways to utilize all that extra gpu memory even if it is for "just" 1920x1080.

 

[ConsoleLover]

AMD received first vega samples from fab around december. There is no way vega will be released in q1.

They have probably tested 3-4 iterations, and considering they are announcing the new Vega in just one day, this means they probably had the final product version for at least two-three months, have been testing it obviously for bugs and software wise and things like reference design and stuff like that, which means they could have been getting products for over a month, if the cards release say mid February that would mean 3+ months of supply, which by this time I think the 14nm process node has matured enough to be churning up good quantities.

 

[raghu78]

They have probably tested 3-4 iterations, and considering they are announcing the new Vega in just one day, this means they probably had the final product version for at least two-three months, have been testing it obviously for bugs and software wise and things like reference design and stuff like that, which means they could have been getting products for over a month, if the cards release say mid February that would mean 3+ months of supply, which by this time I think the 14nm process node has matured enough to be churning up good quantities.

I think Vega either taped out in end of June 2016 or they had first silicon back from the fab.

https://www.techpowerup.com/223672/amd-vega-10-gpu-crosses-a-development-milestone

Anyway 6 months is enough to get atleast 2 revisions done so I think AMD is pretty close to final production silicon. If they need another revision then AMD cannot launch anytime before mid-2017. I am guessing that AMD is demoing Vega because they are confident with its stability and all that remains is driver optimizations. Polaris 10 was demoed at GDC 2016 and launched in late June 2016. I think if we go by the same cadence a CES 2017 demo of Vega would mean a launch in late March / April 2017.

 

[Arachnotronic]

I think Vega either taped out in end of June 2016 or they had first silicon back from the fab.

https://www.techpowerup.com/223672/amd-vega-10-gpu-crosses-a-development-milestone

Anyway 6 months is enough to get atleast 2 revisions done so I think AMD is pretty close to final production silicon. If they need another revision then AMD cannot launch anytime before mid-2017. I am guessing that AMD is demoing Vega because they are confident with its stability and all that remains is driver optimizations. Polaris 10 was demoed at GDC 2016 and launched in late June 2016. I think if we go by the same cadence a CES 2017 demo of Vega would mean a launch in late March / April 2017.

AMD's official statement is 1H 2017, and CFO has said Vega is coming in mid-2017. I wouldn't get my hopes up for a March/April launch if I were you.

 

[raghu78]

AMD's official statement is 1H 2017, and CFO has said Vega is coming in mid-2017. I wouldn't get my hopes up for a March/April launch if I were you.

AMD's statement is H1 2017 because they are addressing Vega for consumer and servers. The CFO too mentioned Vega in the context of servers.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/402...-barclays-global-technology-media?part=single

"Alibaba is introducing a current generation of GPUs, but we do have Vega products coming out in the middle part of 2017. And that should help us from an overall standpoint of being more competitive in a space that, for example, our competitor has taken that world by storm. Everybody is talking about GPU acceleration."

I think Vega and Zen are going to be launching pretty much together for both consumers and server customers. I think we will see Zen Summit Ridge and Vega Radeon in late Q1/early Q2 and Naples with Vega for servers (Radeon Instinct) in mid-2017 / early Q3 2017. In fact AMD have already showed Radeon Instinct with Naples designs

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10905/amd-announces-radeon-instinct-deep-learning-2017/3

 

[Arachnotronic]

AMD's statement is H1 2017 because they are addressing Vega for consumer and servers. The CFO too mentioned Vega in the context of servers.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/402...-barclays-global-technology-media?part=single

"Alibaba is introducing a current generation of GPUs, but we do have Vega products coming out in the middle part of 2017. And that should help us from an overall standpoint of being more competitive in a space that, for example, our competitor has taken that world by storm. Everybody is talking about GPU acceleration."

I think Vega and Zen are going to be launching pretty much together for both consumers and server customers. I think we will see Zen Summit Ridge and Vega Radeon in late Q1/early Q2 and Naples with Vega for servers (Radeon Instinct) in mid-2017 / early Q3 2017. In fact AMD have already showed Radeon Instinct with Naples designs

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10905/amd-announces-radeon-instinct-deep-learning-2017/3

OK, we will see how good our predictions are.

 

[rainy]

AMD's official statement is 1H 2017, and CFO has said Vega is coming in mid-2017. I wouldn't get my hopes up for a March/April launch if I were you.

Care to explain why you want to see release of Vega on 30 June 2017 so desperately?
Btw, personally I would trust more opinion of CTO (Mark Papermaster) rather than CFO (Devinder Kumar).

 

[Arachnotronic]

Care to explain why you want to see release of Vega on 30 June 2017 so desperately?
Btw, personally I would trust more opinion of CTO (Mark Papermaster) rather than CFO (Devinder Kumar).

Doesn't matter at all to me the exact launch timing of Vega, just putting my expectations out there.

 

[zinfamous]

Care to explain why you want to see release of Vega on 30 June 2017 so desperately?
Btw, personally I would trust more opinion of CTO (Mark Papermaster) rather than CFO (Devinder Kumar).

I don't think he wants to see that, he is only going by Su's most recent call to shareholders (c. August/September '16, IIRC) that gave a Vega release estimate. Prior to that, it was Q1 '17, then updated to 1H of 2017, so I think it is fair to say that they delayed a bit to work out another revision? bugs, drivers, whatever, to insure the most optimistic release schedule.

I believe the CEO call to investors as to their most confident time of release is the best information to go by. Sure, maybe AMD is sandbagging here again with release as they seem to have done with Ryzen performance, but I kinda doubt that, because you want to be honest with your shareholders. Remember, this is a new AMD entirely. While there is no reason to ignore their past shenanigans in informing your opinion, you also shouldn't assume these very different people are going to be pulling the same nonsense as the previous group of people. Regardless, they aren't going to change their release from 1Q to 1H if they have any remaining confidence of a substantial 1Q release, imo.

Either that means trickled release, minimum release, or full release of Vega to consumers and server customers, no one really knows. I honestly don't expect anything tangible prior to May. Mentally, this leaves me less disappointed for a potential June release, and surprisingly giddy for anything April or earlier because, why not?

 

[tential]

Care to explain why you want to see release of Vega on 30 June 2017 so desperately?
Btw, personally I would trust more opinion of CTO (Mark Papermaster) rather than CFO (Devinder Kumar).

I would personally trust the cfo since he has to answer to people who pay the bills... Money rules everything.

The insanely optimistic comments with nothing to back em make no sense. This is the same thing that happened with Polaris where it was going to launch way before the competition and never did.....

Consumers ignore everything amd says and just way over hype their products. Most of my disappointment in Vega is due to overly optimistic comments by consumers I imagine. If I just listened to amd, I know Vega is no where close....

 

[ElFenix]

can you guys use the other thread to discuss launch windows? this is for the architecture preview expected to be at CES tomorrow.

 

[krumme]

When Lisa says zen is very fast - and we know it actually is imo straight out crazy fast - and then goes on to claim vega is very very fast i am sure we are in for fantastic improvement. But.. Now where do they get the beating of Volta from?

I mean one thing is catching up to a sleeping Intel in a compettition where st perf hits a wall and new nodes becomes far more expensive. Another is beating Volta.

I wouldnt count on it. Pascal was a minor arch upgrade. I think Volta will bring some serious stuff especially on the dx12 side. Intel was kind of slowing down. Nv havnt shown any such signs.

 

[Headfoot]

I wouldnt count on it. Pascal was a minor arch upgrade. I think Volta will bring some serious stuff especially on the dx12 side. Intel was kind of slowing down. Nv havnt shown any such signs.

Agreed. NV is plowing ahead at full speed no holds barred. But during this preview, I hope we get to verify the "Fast" comments Lisa made. It would be nice to get more data as to whether she is more believable than AMD talking heads of the past. So far we've only got the Fury release to look at

 

[swilli89]

Agreed. NV is plowing ahead at full speed no holds barred. But during this preview, I hope we get to verify the "Fast" comments Lisa made. It would be nice to get more data as to whether she is more believable than AMD talking heads of the past. So far we've only got the Fury release to look at

Not really.. If they had their foot on the gas the 1080 would have launched at $399 and we would have had a GP102 at launch for $699 just like most of their previous generations.

 

[Headfoot]

Not really.. If they had their foot on the gas the 1080 would have launched at $399 and we would have had a GP102 at launch for $699 just like most of their previous generations.

I mean purely from a technology standpoint, I'm not commenting on business practices here

 

[ElFenix]

This isn't the Nvidia discussion forum either.

 

[dacostafilipe]

Exclusive: AMD VEGA Presentation

Source : http://videocardz.com/65406/exclusive-amd-vega-presentation

 

[Krteq]

Hmm, NCU, new cache system, new rasterizer and primitive pipeline looks promising.

RBEs are now tied to L2 cache, interesting.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Exclusive: AMD VEGA Presentation

Source : http://videocardz.com/65406/exclusive-amd-vega-presentation

Thanks! Interesting read - just skimmed the slides. I'd like to read Anandtech's full write up of the changes in Vega - they sound huge.

They make me think that Polaris was similar to Intel's strategy of producing an old architecture on a new process. And, when you have learned the process, producing a new architecture on that process. Reason being, Polaris is not massively different in its architecture compared to previous GCN GPUs. But Vega sounds very different.

Pity the presentation does not mention actual GPUs.

 

[Samwell]

Looking great, so Vega is really the big architecture step. A lot of interesting stuff, just not the stuff from this one paper which people believed so often.
Interesting that they choose now 128 SP CUs, add the Stream binning rasterizer which should be something like nvidia has since maxwell and the optimization on ipc and clock speed it seems that Nvs and Amds architecture are converging more and more to the same point.

 

[Sven_eng]

Haha Fiji on 14nm!