Discussion RDNA 5 / UDNA (CDNA Next) speculation

[luro]

?

Nvm, I misunderstood.

 

[jpiniero]

Have it ever started?
PS1/2/4 were dang cheap boxes.

Oh they've always been subsidized.

But they were able to cut the prices of the consoles too later in the lifecycle because Moore's Law wasn't dead then.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Oh they've always been subsidized.

No, PS1 and PS4 were built to be cheap AF from the get-go.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

they never had them.

This is false. Unless you're accusing both companies of lying to their shareholders.
Home console hardware from Microsoft and Sony were always subsidized at launch, with Sony claiming very openly when they stop losing money with each console.

Sony CEO Kaz Hirai says PS4 is already profitable

www.polygon.com

Microsoft would like to remind you the Xbox definitely makes money

Xbox consoles are sold at a loss

www.theverge.com

A Microsoft executive has admitted that the company doesn’t earn any profit on sales of Xbox consoles alone. The admission came as part of the Epic v. Apple trial yesterday, confirming what we’ve known for years: Microsoft sells Xbox consoles at a loss. Asked how much margin Microsoft makes on Xbox consoles, the company’s head of Xbox business development, Lori Wright, said, “We don’t; we sell the consoles at a loss.”

Sony’s $499 PS5 is no longer selling at a loss

The PS5 won’t be costly like the PS3.

www.theverge.com

Sony’s $499 PlayStation 5 console is no longer selling at a loss. Bloomberg reports that Sony chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki shared the news just a week after the company announced it had sold 10 million PS5 consoles.

The only exception to this was probably the PS5 Pro.

 

[adroc_thurston]

This is false. Unless you're accusing both companies of lying to their shareholders.
Home console hardware from Microsoft and Sony were always subsidized at launch, with Sony claiming very openly when they stop losing money with each console.

Sony CEO Kaz Hirai says PS4 is already profitable

www.polygon.com

Microsoft would like to remind you the Xbox definitely makes money

Xbox consoles are sold at a loss

www.theverge.com

Sony’s $499 PS5 is no longer selling at a loss

The PS5 won’t be costly like the PS3.

www.theverge.com

The only exception to this was probably the PS5 Pro.

Loss here means not per-unit costs, but stuff to account for NRE paid.

 

[eek2121]

Won't happen... AI is here to stay

What will burst is meaningless investment into meaningless "startups"

Then the only bubble burst re hardware will be when performance requirements plateau

Oh the AI bubble will burst, eventually. The economics of it all don’t work. More money has been spent than will ever be regained through subscription revenue, LLM development will plateau, and open source models will mean nobody has a monopoly.

This is false. Unless you're accusing both companies of lying to their shareholders.
Home console hardware from Microsoft and Sony were always subsidized at launch, with Sony claiming very openly when they stop losing money with each console.

Sony CEO Kaz Hirai says PS4 is already profitable

www.polygon.com

Microsoft would like to remind you the Xbox definitely makes money

Xbox consoles are sold at a loss

www.theverge.com

Sony’s $499 PS5 is no longer selling at a loss

The PS5 won’t be costly like the PS3.

www.theverge.com

The only exception to this was probably the PS5 Pro.

IIRC On a per unit basis consoles were almost never sold at a loss. The actual losses Sony and others were talking about are things like Marketing, R&D, legal, etc.

 

[soresu]

OpenAI validated AMD Mi450, and now other can also follow.

They validated much more than MI450. They validated the things that come after MI450..

I feel like this is the wrong word to use given what validation usually means in the context of nascent silicon in enterprise markets.

My first reaction to this was to assume you both meant that OpenAI had literally tested their models on MI450 engineering samples until I read "after MI450".

 

[Thunder 57]

Oh the AI bubble will burst, eventually. The economics of it all don’t work. More money has been spent than will ever be regained through subscription revenue, LLM development will plateau, and open source models will mean nobody has a monopoly.

IIRC On a per unit basis consoles were almost never sold at a loss. The actual losses Sony and others were talking about are things like Marketing, R&D, legal, etc.

I suppose that's possible, but the articles linked by @ToTTenTranz aren't clear on that. I thought they were generally sold at a bit of a loss but made up for it handsomely through controllers, memory cards, royalties (wrong word) from 3rd party titles, Playstation network or whatever they call it, etc.

 

[branch_suggestion]

Well they were nice enough to confirm several patents before the thing has even taped out.

 

[jpiniero]

I thought they were generally sold at a bit of a loss but made up for it handsomely through controllers, memory cards, royalties (wrong word) from 3rd party titles, Playstation network or whatever they call it, etc.

Yes. Historically though it has been possible for console makers to cut the price AND make a small profit on the hardware at the end of the cycle.

That's not happening anymore obviously, because the costs are going up and not down.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

Well they were nice enough to confirm several patents before the thing has even taped out.

Looks like they're mostly announcing three things:

- New inter-CU glue (mesh-like?) that enhances ML efficiency.

- Improved raytracing / path-tracing performance through "Radiance Cores".

- "Universal Compression" which should increase effective bandwidth and could be behind the seemingly anemic AT3 and AT4 memory bandwidth without L3.

 

[adroc_thurston]

- New inter-CU glue (mesh-like?) that enhances ML efficiency

They're just shmem to shmem transfers.

- "Universal Compression" which should increase effective bandwidth and could be behind the seemingly anemic AT3 and AT4 memory bandwidth without L3.

oh no there's much more than that.

 

[branch_suggestion]

Well they were nice enough to confirm several patents before the thing has even taped out.

I will say 'unified light transport' seems to imply they are programmable RT cores.

 

[adroc_thurston]

I will say 'unified light transport' seems to imply they are programmable RT cores.

they already are on PS5.
Non-programmability is a DXR (read NVidia) issue.

 

[Win2012R2]

- Improved raytracing / path-tracing performance through "Radiance Cores".

So that's AMD saying they'll finally get dedicated ray tracing units just like Nvidia had since Turin...

 

[adroc_thurston]

So that's AMD saying they'll finally get dedicated ray tracing units just like Nvidia had since Turin...

no.

 

[Win2012R2]

Neural Arrays = Tensor cores? Sure sounds that way.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Neural Arrays = Tensor cores?

again, they already do GEMM.

Sure sounds that way.

Wishful thinking.
They always do things their own way. The crackpot way.

 

[soresu]

Neural Arrays = Tensor cores? Sure sounds that way.

No, more like an intra SE ML task sharing system.

Perhaps with its own side cache per SE to reduce VRAM access.

 

[adroc_thurston]

No, more like an intra SE ML task sharing system.

They're just shmem to shmem transfers a-la H100.

 

[soresu]

They're just shmem to shmem transfers a-la H100.

....

What you are talking about is a feature that was part of OpenCL 2.0 years ago.

 

[adroc_thurston]

What you are talking about is a feature that was part of OpenCL 2.0 years ago.

Normal shmem to shmem transfers happen thru your gmem.
Hopper style shmem uses CPC forwarding networks to do that without hitting the gmem.

 

[soresu]

CPC forwarding

= Copy/Push Command?

 

[adroc_thurston]

= Copy/Push Command?

Compute Processing Cluster.
Also an H100 thing.

 

[soresu]

Compute Processing Cluster.
Also an H100 thing.

Seems like Hopper has a lot of architecture jargon to go with it, but none of the nVidia official PR I can find mentions this, can you supply a link to wherever you found it?

The only thing that sounds sorta like what you are talking about when I search for it is the "thread block cluster", or perhaps "asynchronous transaction barriers".