Discussion RDNA4 + CDNA3 Architectures Thread

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DisEnchantment

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With the GFX940 patches in full swing since first week of March, it is looking like MI300 is not far in the distant future!
Usually AMD takes around 3Qs to get the support in LLVM and amdgpu. Lately, since RDNA2 the window they push to add support for new devices is much reduced to prevent leaks.
But looking at the flurry of code in LLVM, it is a lot of commits. Maybe because US Govt is starting to prepare the SW environment for El Capitan (Maybe to avoid slow bring up situation like Frontier for example)

See here for the GFX940 specific commits
Or Phoronix

There is a lot more if you know whom to follow in LLVM review chains (before getting merged to github), but I am not going to link AMD employees.

I am starting to think MI300 will launch around the same time like Hopper probably only a couple of months later!
Although I believe Hopper had problems not having a host CPU capable of doing PCIe 5 in the very near future therefore it might have gotten pushed back a bit until SPR and Genoa arrives later in 2022.
If PVC slips again I believe MI300 could launch before it :grimacing:

This is nuts, MI100/200/300 cadence is impressive.

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Previous thread on CDNA2 and RDNA3 here

 
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Timorous

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That would not move the bar much at all in terms of performance/dollar.

I don't think there will be much movement on that front. A small step and a beefing up of VRAM on the low end but nothing groundbreaking. I don't see another 4870 moment because as great as that was for the consumer it just did not work and AMD would much rather eat margin which if they have the performance to charge $600 for an N23 ish sized GPU they absolutely will.
 

Aapje

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Mar 21, 2022
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As long as AMD is just reacting to what Nvidia does and what the market will bear, talking about performance/dollar seems pretty pointless unless you include Nvidia in the conversation or what consumers will accept.

The question for me is whether Nvidia is going to act like they did with the 10-series and intended to do with the 30-series, to give a pretty nice uplift after a series that didn't sell so well.

It's hard for me to judge how RDNA4 will perform, especially since they cancelled 3 of the 4 chips they wanted to make and then added a new design (N48 is obviously new, if you look at the code name). Is this going to be a mediocre design to just hold them over until RDNA5, where they have little room to be aggressive with the price, or did they fix the major issues with RDNA3 and improve some other things, to be quite good? Hard to say.
 
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moinmoin

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As long as AMD is just reacting to what Nvidia does and what the market will bear
If you don't offer the top product in a given market the only thing you can do is react in relation to the existing market circumstances to carve out a niche. That's why the goal always is to bring a highly competitive top product to the market even if most sales are elsewhere. With GPUs both AMD and Intel failed at that lately.
 

blckgrffn

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As long as AMD is just reacting to what Nvidia does and what the market will bear, talking about performance/dollar seems pretty pointless unless you include Nvidia in the conversation or what consumers will accept.

The question for me is whether Nvidia is going to act like they did with the 10-series and intended to do with the 30-series, to give a pretty nice uplift after a series that didn't sell so well.

It's hard for me to judge how RDNA4 will perform, especially since they cancelled 3 of the 4 chips they wanted to make and then added a new design (N48 is obviously new, if you look at the code name). Is this going to be a mediocre design to just hold them over until RDNA5, where they have little room to be aggressive with the price, or did they fix the major issues with RDNA3 and improve some other things, to be quite good? Hard to say.

I am wondering if this is the next Polaris vs being a flash in the pan. Optimized die sizes, better than or competitive with current gen consoles and the full DX 12U feature set, this could really be the “bottom” end of the AMD lineup for the next 3 years or so. We keep saying how it’s a stopgap, but maybe it’s just going to be competent.

Given AMD is like Nvidia and needs to chase the data center compute monster, it feels like a possibility to me.
 

MrTeal

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That s right but it will also absorb the radiation that come from the heated matter that is around, be it the air or the PC case and other elements, if those elements are at lower temp then they will absorb more energy from the card than what they send it in return, hence the importance to keep the case interior at significantly lower temp than the card to benefit from some radiative dissipation.
Yeah, and something with high emissivity will absorb more as well. The GPU surface will net dissipate heat through radiation since it's going to be hotter than the rest of the case, but it's going to be pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.
 

GodisanAtheist

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Nov 16, 2006
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I am wondering if this is the next Polaris vs being a flash in the pan. Optimized die sizes, better than or competitive with current gen consoles and the full DX 12U feature set, this could really be the “bottom” end of the AMD lineup for the next 3 years or so. We keep saying how it’s a stopgap, but maybe it’s just going to be competent.

Given AMD is like Nvidia and needs to chase the data center compute monster, it feels like a possibility to me.

-Yeah, AMD isn't putting work into N44/48 without the expectation that they'll be rebranded into the bottom tier of the RDNA5 stack.
 
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Aapje

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Neither AMD, Nvidia or Intel relegates their entire product stack to the bottom tier of the next gen, so...

The goal is to be able to make something better for the same amount of dollars, so they can get people to upgrade, while maintaining margins.
 

Aapje

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If you don't offer the top product in a given market the only thing you can do is react in relation to the existing market circumstances to carve out a niche.

Most people don't buy the 4090, so that's not how it works.

Nvidia does have a premium brand, which makes people willing to spend more, but Nvidia also takes advantage of that to price their products really high. So AMD does have room to make a very price-competitive product if they make a very efficient design and accept more modest margins.

A big mistake that AMD makes is that they assume that Nvidia prices their products at an attractive level, so AMD only tries to make their products attractive relative to Nvidia. But if Nvidia asks too much for the market to bear, as they mostly did with Ada, then this means that AMD does the same. In fact, it is worse, because AMD even overestimates how attractive they are compared to Nvidia.

The end result is that AMD gets bad reviews and constantly runs into getting bad sales after launch, requiring them to cut prices very quickly after release. This is just a very bad strategy that costs them sales, positive attention and also exposes them as incompetents, who cannot read the market.
 

SolidQ

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Jul 13, 2023
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The end result is that AMD gets bad reviews and constantly runs into getting bad sales after launch, requiring them to cut prices very quickly after release
Despite this, AMD still got additional 7% in 2023
vMy2CvCwD5xGUivSzE37mi-970-80.png.webp
 
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Despite this, AMD still got additional 7% in 2023
SInce Jensen can do no wrong, I bet the AMD gain is a direct result of too much demand for Geforce RTX cards leading to cards going out of stock in many places and buyers settling for the inferior AMD cards instead of returning home empty handed and crying themselves to sleep.

/s
 

blckgrffn

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SInce Jensen can do no wrong, I bet the AMD gain is a direct result of too much demand for Geforce RTX cards leading to cards going out of stock in many places and buyers settling for the inferior AMD cards instead of returning home empty handed and crying themselves to sleep.

/s
Reddit still hates AMD with the fire of a million suns outside of r/amd, with every post lamenting crazy issues when people “gave AMD a chance” and came back to the promised land and warm embrace of Nvidia.

However on sites like Slickdeals there is definitely an eye now turned to value and Nvidia has lost mindshare there compared to what I observed maybe 3-5 years ago. Good will has been burnt and folks seem to upvote both AMD and worthy Intel deals.

It is what it is, but a better split is a healthier market.

On RDNA 4 being the bottom end, it makes sense to me for a while at least. If we get multi chip RDNA5 from say $700-$2500 a “refreshed” RDNA4 (gddr7?) probably makes sense at $600 and below for longer than we would like. My $.02.
 
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Abwx

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Apr 2, 2011
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Despite this, AMD still got additional 7% in 2023
vMy2CvCwD5xGUivSzE37mi-970-80.png.webp

Those numbers include only the GPUs shipped by a few brands within commercials PCs, DTs and laptops, the consumers GPU market is not included, so that s numbers that are very far from reality, as an exemple of consumer s market here the weekly GPUs sales of the biggest german retailer :

 
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Aapje

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Don't think it's a "cannot read the market" thing, it's that the margins suck of the product they do sell...

They are obviously able to sell for less, given that they do. I think that only Intel sells their GPUs at a loss or at production cost (which means that they make a loss if you factor in R&D).
 

gdansk

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Feb 8, 2011
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I think the "cutting prices soon after release" is AMD trying to get actual margins on the GPUs... and failing...
I think it's aiming to get near Nvidia margins without spending all that much on R&D. And where possible getting Sony/Microsoft to pay for R&D.

Consumers aren't falling for it - they only buy Radeon when they adjust their margins down closer to what they deserve.
 

Abwx

Lifer
Apr 2, 2011
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I know about it. Despite it, some people still think, AMD will fight with Intel for 5-10% marketshare, and Nvidia will sit with 90% forever

That s deliberate ignorance from their part, when we look at the financials of both firms it s obvious that JPR numbers are heavily flawed, FI Nvidia s consumers sales are far from being 4x those of AMD s, that s about 1.8-2x IIRC, and that s in $ share not on numbers of units sold.

Now on RDNA4 rumours i guess that AMD is targeting 90% of the market with their next GPU line, and it s not even sure that the higher end account for 10% of the sales, eventually in revenues, so it make sense to concentrate on products that are up to the 7900XT level and below.
 

jpiniero

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That s deliberate ignorance from their part, when we look at the financials of both firms it s obvious that JPR numbers are heavily flawed, FI Nvidia s consumers sales are far from being 4x those of AMD s, that s about 1.8-2x IIRC, and that s in $ share not on numbers of units sold.

It's way higher than that... esp given that the "Gaming" segment includes the full cost of the console dies...

PS5 is (was?) like $1B+ per quarter alone.
 

MrTeal

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Dec 7, 2003
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It's way higher than that... esp given that the "Gaming" segment includes the full cost of the console dies...

PS5 is (was?) like $1B+ per quarter alone.
We'll see what it looks like when Q1 results come out now that full stacks are out for both vendors. Q4 AMD had $1.46B for gaming including the semi-custom work. It'd be nice is they broke that out, but we're left guessing. Nvidia had gaming revenue of $2.9B which would all gaming, plus another $0.46B in Professional Visualization that's broken out for things like RTX 2000 Ada. I'm not sure where AMD reports revenue for the Radeon Pros; it seems more likely in Gaming than DC but I can't easily find a source on that.

4x seems more likely than 1.7-2x though if you're just looking at GPUs in PCs.