Question Speculation: RDNA2 + CDNA Architectures thread

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uzzi38

Platinum Member
Oct 16, 2019
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All die sizes are within 5mm^2. The poster here has been right on some things in the past afaik, and to his credit was the first to saying 505mm^2 for Navi21, which other people have backed up. Even still though, take the following with a pich of salt.

Navi21 - 505mm^2

Navi22 - 340mm^2

Navi23 - 240mm^2

Source is the following post: https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/PC_Shopping/M.1588075782.A.C1E.html
 

PhoBoChai

Member
Oct 10, 2017
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I'm not sure I agree about his leadership skills. Vega was a terrible gaming card, HBM was a terrible bet in general for gaming cards and 4GB HBM1 was a death blow for Fury (not sure how much this was his fault, as this was ~2 years after he returned, but he still kept talking about HBM all the time) - but he's a well respected engineer, and maybe with unlimited funds at Intel he'll do better. However, I mostly dislike him because of marketing and his huge mouth, and he couldn't deliver. Not saying it's his fault, it's difficult combating both Intel and Nvidia with lower R&D funding, but marketing under his leadership was terrible.

It's so weird to see people criticize GCN iterations as if it was Raja's fault. Those were already on the roadmap, well under way without his input.

His only fault is as you say, his tendency to over promise to the media and not realizing the financial problems AMD was under so he should not have promised an entire Polaris stack when AMD could not afford to design and bring up so many. That was peak Zen time.

Funny thing is, Polaris 10 is one of the best GCN design from AMD, it competed fairly well with the 1060, similar die size, not massively more power, and only slightly more transistors. You can see AMD was broke, they recycled it as 580, 590.

The biggest fail was Vega, end of the GCN line and expensive HBM2. Maybe he should have kept his mouth quiet and don't talk to the tech media. But the way I see it, that is GCN's life cycle, it ran into the dead end just like Carrizo for Bulldozer.

GCN was always behind in Tflops to gaming performance vs NV, some by a huge margin, it needed many more transistors & power to compete, making high-end off-limit as they were already busting 300W to compete vs mid-range NV stuff. But RDNA1 brought them back from the wilderness IMO, just look at its perf/transistors and Tflops, very comparable to NV's best.

David Wang + Suzanne Plummer has a good base to build upon, and for all the ppl thinking Raja and his big mouth deserves disrespect, at the very least, he did deliver to AMD what he was hired to do, a new architecture beyond GCN.

Perhaps Raja should have been like Keller and stay quiet, focus on the work, and not be the face of the current roadmap GCN launches, as he becomes the punching bag for what is really his predecessors design and decisions. IF RDNA2 turns out amazing, a lot of ppl will praise David Wang, however, he has always been one of the chief graphics architects, and one of the key player who designed GCN back in the 2009 to 2011 era. Nobody blames him for it, rightly so, because AMD wanted a compute GPU for datacenters to chase after lucrative markets that CUDA opened.

It really comes down to AMD itself, it was broke, approaching bankruptcy, it has no right to chase after so many markets. Should have focused, pure gaming, both CPU & GPU. Instead they got FX, and GCN and stuck with it for a decade until something new was developed.
 
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Konan

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Jul 28, 2017
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Well VideoCardz with the details! And earlier Coreteks
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT – Navi 21 XTX AMD’s Big Navi will feature 80 Compute Units (5120 Stream Processors). This card will be (for now) AMD exclusive. The Radeon RX 6900XT will be the AMD flagship series, which according to our sources will be in limited quantity. The card would allegedly feature 16GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit bus. The graphics card would feature a 2040 MHz game clock and a 2330 MHz boost clock.
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT – Navi 21 XT The cut-down Navi 21 codenamed XT will feature 72 Compute Units (4608 Stream Processors) paired with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. This card will also feature a 256-bit memory bus and clock speed above 2.0 GHz. The game clock is expected to be 2015 MHz and the boost clock should be under 2250 MHz. These are of course AMD reference clocks.
AMD Radeon RX 6800 – Navi 21 XL The RX 6800 non-X will feature Navi 21 XL variant with 64 Compute Units (4096 Stream Processors). Similarly to 6900XT and 6800XT it will also come with 16GB GDDR6 memory and a 256-bit memory bus. The clock speeds are lower for this part with an 1815 MHz game clock and 2150 MHz boost clock.
The Radeon RX 6900XT, 6800XT, and 6800 will all be unveiled on October 28th.


 
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dzoni2k2

Member
Sep 30, 2009
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I'm pretty sure it's another BS guess. Pretty reliable leakers have confirmed its 80, 72, 72. It also makes more sense since AMD never cuts a full die by that much. We'll see.

Oh god why did I even bother reading nonsense from Coreteks. The guy is saying a 64CU RX6800 with 1820MHz game clock (funny how it's the same as XSX) pulls 290W. Meanwhile a 52CU XSX peaks at 145W lol.
 
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beginner99

Diamond Member
Jun 2, 2009
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Why do ppl disrespect Raja? Read the Anandtech article on his return to AMD. Mark Papermaster asked him to develop a post-GCN, brand new architecture. Very similar goals to Jim Keller being hired back to AMD, post-FX CPU new architecture, Zen.

Yet Tiger Lake with Xe iGPU is trading blows with Zen 2 APUs in performance. In a single generation Intel manage to come back from what, 3 gens behind on graphics performance?

As other have said due to the overhyping (poor volta) and the obvious powergames he was playing (RTG) made him very unlikable.

As for tigerlake iGPU, performance per die size and performance/watt matter too and it's clear AMD has the clear lead in that area. In fact I think Intel is going the wrong way with too big iGPUs. AMD with renoir for once made a smart choice focusing on CPU vs GPU. AMD could easily add CUs and stay within sane power use but they preferred a smaller die.
 

pandemonium

Golden Member
Mar 17, 2011
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... I think the "Rage mode" thing would make sense in that AMD could trumpet their perf/w lead using one mode, and their performance metrics using the other. Best of both worlds.

So what you're saying is we're going to have "vtec just kicked in, yo" for our GPUs? I'm down with that. (Joking, of course. Turbo modes/Boost clocks could be just as easily inferred as a more aggressive cam, er, uh, voltage/frequency profile.)
 

Gideon

Golden Member
Nov 27, 2007
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As other have said due to the overhyping (poor volta) and the obvious powergames he was playing (RTG) made him very unlikable.

As for tigerlake iGPU, performance per die size and performance/watt matter too and it's clear AMD has the clear lead in that area. In fact I think Intel is going the wrong way with too big iGPUs. AMD with renoir for once made a smart choice focusing on CPU vs GPU. AMD could easily add CUs and stay within sane power use but they preferred a smaller die.
Yeah pretty much it. Plus his performances on events were always full cringe.

Raja went to Intel and ppl laughed it off, that Intel has no chance to be competitive in graphics since they were so far behind. Yet Tiger Lake with Xe iGPU is trading blows with Zen 2 APUs in performance. In a single generation Intel manage to come back from what, 3 gens behind on graphics performance?

It's so weird to see people criticize GCN iterations as if it was Raja's fault. Those were already on the roadmap, well under way without his input.

There are some double standards here. Xe was also well underway, before Raja joined. Can't have it both ways.
 

Veradun

Senior member
Jul 29, 2016
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I'm pretty sure it's another BS guess. Pretty reliable leakers have confirmed its 80, 72, 72. It also makes more sense since AMD never cuts a full die by that much. We'll see.

Oh god why did I even bother reading nonsense from Coreteks. The guy is saying a 64CU RX6800 with 1820MHz game clock (funny how it's the same as XSX) pulls 290W. Meanwhile a 52CU XSX peaks at 145W lol.
But does it have a traversal co-processor?
 

PhoBoChai

Member
Oct 10, 2017
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There are some double standards here. Xe was also well underway, before Raja joined. Can't have it both ways.

2017. Intel has a ton of funding for their graphics division, unlike AMD. That's enough time for a late 2020 release of early Xe, with more to come in 2021. In fact, when he joined Intel in 2017, people discussed 2021 time frames as when we'll get their new architecture.
 

HurleyBird

Platinum Member
Apr 22, 2003
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As other have said due to the overhyping (poor volta) and the obvious powergames he was playing (RTG) made him very unlikable.

What makes him unlikeable to me is his pathological self-promotion. Besides being an annoying quality in and of itself, combined with his extremely poor track record heading RTG it makes me seriously question his ability. Did he climb the corporate ladder because he's competent, or is he just good at playing the corporate game? The same traits that helped Raja gain his limited celebrity are also the traits that would help a rung-climbing career-minded corporate sociopath attain a powerful position.

Under Raja's leadership it's not just that RTG took a swing and a miss ala. R600 or FX. They both failed to properly innovate on GCN while simultaneously falling on their faces whenever they did try anything novel (eg. primitive shaders). Sure, AMD doesn't have the resources that Nvidia does, and AMD was more focused on CPUs but, honest to God question, if you could go back in time and replace Raja with Keller (or the GPU equivalent), and then cut the already limited GPU budget in half do you think you would end up with a better performing RTG or a worse one?

Even without pointing out how R&D giants like Intel can flounder while plucky startups sometimes make magic, I think we all instinctively know the answer to that one. You do good engineering by having good engineers and good leadership.

Occam's razor here says that the only thing Raja is especially skilled at is promoting Raja.
 

Dribble

Platinum Member
Aug 9, 2005
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Why do ppl disrespect Raja? ....
It's all forum psychology, he is a scapegoat. AMD didn't deliver a card that could beat Nvidia while he was there and he has now left. Putting all the blame on him means that people can hope RDNA2 can now beat Nvidia because he's not in charge. Where as in-fact he was just a cog in a very big wheel and him being there, or not being there will have in the end made a very small difference to how RDNA2 turns out.
 

soresu

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2014
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It's all forum psychology, he is a scapegoat.
It's not all forum psychology.

He was a bit of a chatterbox at PR events and floated GPU chiplets in passing conversation before we even saw chiplets properly in Zen 2 platforms.

If nothing else he put ideas in peoples heads long, long before AMD was ready to make good on them - that does tend to put a bit of undue expectation on AMD to produce something equally astounding as Zen 2 earlier than the RTG budget allowed for.
 

zinfamous

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Jul 12, 2006
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80, 72 and 64 CUs. As was speculated by many for a long time already.

yeah, but the full die 80 CU unit being AMD exclusive, limited release?

Not gonna make people happy, if that ends up being true. So, I don't believe it, at least forever. I do think it's an industry-wide force on supply that is making these decisions necessary. So, I can definitely see full 80 CU dies being mostly unobtainable throughout the next year, until a refreshed mid-arch stack pops up and they release an "anniversary" version or something.
 

Head1985

Golden Member
Jul 8, 2014
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Oh god why did I even bother reading nonsense from Coreteks. The guy is saying a 64CU RX6800 with 1820MHz game clock (funny how it's the same as XSX) pulls 290W. Meanwhile a 52CU XSX peaks at 145W lol.
Not to mention 2.5Ghz AIB Navi 21.If stock navi 21 is 300+ how many W will pull 2.5Ghz oc?500w?Its BS.
No way reference navi will be that power hungry.I still think all reference navi 21 will be bellowe 300w.
 

leoneazzurro

Golden Member
Jul 26, 2016
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To me, the strange feeling in the RDNA2 lineup is the uncommon rumored gap between the top of the line (80CU) and the next smaller die (40 CU) and the very small gap between Navi 22, 23 and 23 to 24. Granted that we will see cut down Navi21 dies, but seeing that a certain performance target could have been covered with a slightly larger die (60-64CU) compared to the rumored 40CU of Navi22, while 40 is also quite near the 32 CU figure for NAVI23 (and both will be also cut down). One possibility is that AMD is trying to target these GPUs not only for the desktop marked but especially for the mobile market, where a smaller bus for the memory and possibly better clock/power/voltage curve compared to the competition could be a winning factor for OEMs.