What will be AMD'S next Move?

[GodisanAtheist]

With all the discussion about efficiency around here, people seem to be losing sight of what dgpus are all about: performance. If AMD can put out a "Big Island" Hawaii that tops stock 980 performance by 20%+, all will be forgiven.

Ultimately, AMD will need to work on core efficiency not just for their dgpus but for their APUs as well, but they really just need the performance to stay in the game.

 

[PPB]

Isn't the 285 recently released supposed to be a revised and more efficient architecture, although not on the scale of Maxwell vs Kepler of course? But I agree, AMD has backed themselves into a corner by committing so much to mantle that it probably makes it hard to go away from GCN.

Power gating =/= uarch. If AMD were harmstrung by mantle like you said, 285 would run just fine using Mantle. It is not, because there are architectural changes worth needing a succesive patch to better use GCN 1.2


Next please.

 

[Grooveriding]

Nvidia is not Intel and doesn't have even a fraction of the resources Intel has or access to the technology leadership Intel does. Discreet GPUs are also a much smaller market than CPUs and their chipsets that Intel is sitting on along with all the other pies Intel has their fingers in. As long as AMD and nvidia are using the same fab one will never run away from the other the way Intel has from AMD in CPUs.

Maxwell is just a much better architecture than GCN and a newer one. I think what we're hearing is just wishful thinking that this is AMD's death knell. They could put out a monolithic 550mm2 GCN GPU that guzzles power with a stock water cooler that crushes everything, but that seems unlikely given their history. It would still sell to the people who want the fastest card out there regardless. Those buyers don't give a rats for power consumption if it stands in the way of absolute performance.

They'll cut prices and do whatever they do until their next cards are out and the cycle will continue. I see this as not much different than Evergreen taking a dump on Fermi for a year.

 

[Silverforce11]

Selling a few high end cards with raw performance at 350W isn't going to save AMD.

You can put a power hungry GPU into a desktop, fine. But you aren't gonna do very well in a laptop for instance.

They need to compete on notebooks and mobiles too, else its just wasted opportunity. All that R&D expenditure without these large markets to provide returns is what has been causing them to be broke.

They cannot compete with on these markets without major perf/w improvements. How many generations has it been that they had next to no impact on notebooks? I don't think they can survive the next few years after GCN 2.0 if it remains dominated by NV.

 

[ShintaiDK]

GCN1.2 seems to be the answer to Maxwell. And thats not going to do anything.

So I guess all AMD can do is to cut prices and then try the bulldozer approach, selling 300-375W water cooled cards to compete with 165-2xxW nVidia cards.

And with AMDs limited and reduced R&D budget over the time. It makes one wonder if they have anything at all or if this is the "conroe" moment. Point of no return.

 

[Silverforce11]

Tonga is just a cheaper to produce Tahiti. The real competition is a true next-gen architecture, and we won't know how long it will be until its ready. So from now to then, it's a lot of bleeding.

If GCN2 arrives and the focus isn't on perf/w, its game over, truly their conroe moment for the GPU division.

 

[Rezist]

AMD kept going for the compute performance when gamers don't care I kinda feel like AMD is making a Fermi mistake, where nVidia released power hungry cards that were more geared for HPC then gaming and costed more because of it.

 

[tviceman]

Tonga is just a cheaper to produce Tahiti. The real competition is a true next-gen architecture, and we won't know how long it will be until its ready. So from now to then, it's a lot of bleeding.

If GCN2 arrives and the focus isn't on perf/w, its game over, truly their conroe moment for the GPU division.

Show me proof that Tonga is cheaper off the assembly line . Its bigger than Tahiti and has more transistors. Board components might be slightly lower in cost, but AMD doesn't pay for or absorb those savings.

I do not see how Tonga is cheaper to produce than Tahiti at TSMC in any meaningful way. IMO, it was the biggest disappointing GPU in years.

 

[Cloudfire777]

As I've said in the main review thread, AMD's GCN 2.0 needs to be very efficient or they are dead.

Efficiency is king in notebooks & mobiles, and that's a huge market they cannot afford to constantly lose.

In the short-term, their only option is to price-cut and that will hurt their profits. AMD needs their GPU division to make the money, because their R&D for CPUs & APUs are funded by the only profitable division: Graphics.

AMD have already lost the war against Nvidia in the gaming mobile space.

GTX 780M have been the best mobile gaming card since May 2013. AMD still haven`t responded.
Now Maxwell GTX 970M and GTX 980M is out on notebooks in October, beating a GTX 780M by 70-80%. Probably 2x as fast as R9 M290X.
Alienware, MSI, Asus and Gigabyte which are big brands for notebooks are only offering Nvidia GPUs for the gaming notebooks.

AMD can release a huge and hot chip for desktop, but that isnt something they can shove in a notebook due to thermal restriction. So unless AMD have a new architecture, Nvidia will continue alone on that market.

That we have seen no leaks regarding new architecture from AMD, that they made a huge event just for Tonga which should have never existed. I dont know, but it seems dark regarding that they have an answer to Maxwell.

HBM is one thing, but bandwidth alone is nothing without the cores to push things through that wide road

 

[jpiniero]

I do not see how Tonga is cheaper to produce than Tahiti at TSMC in any meaningful way. IMO, it was the biggest disappointing GPU in years.

Tonga is bigger than Tahiti... but only slightly (352 vs 359 mm). Going from 3 GB to 2 GB probably more than makes up for it.

 

[SlickR12345]

Why is this here? They are going to release their new 300 series of graphic cards, whether its 3-4-5 months from now it doesn't matter.

In the mean time they can release a refined 290x, everyone knows the reference design on these cards is really poor, but they can use very high quality parts, high quality cooler, apply all the knowledge and experience and come out with a 290 Ultra.

The 290 Ultra will have higher core clock, higher memory clock and higher boost clock, with the new quality parts being used they can reduce power consumption and temperature and to top it off with high quality cooler to keep the card extremely cool and quiet they can compete with Nvidia again.

 

[desprado]

Just look at the GTX 980m performance and power usage.It is nearly double the performance of GTX 880m and less in power consumption.
AMD really cannot survive only by selling DGPU and of course they are power hungry and hot.They really need to forget about mantle and work on new architecture.

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-...mark-firestrike-performance-numbers-unveiled/

 

[Gloomy]

Just look at the GTX 980m performance and power usage.It is nearly double the performance of GTX 880m and less in power consumption.
AMD really cannot survive only by selling DGPU and of course they are power hungry and hot.They really need to forget about mantle and work on new architecture.

http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-...mark-firestrike-performance-numbers-unveiled/

AMD's software developers working on Mantle should take over chip design?

Good idea. Then they could take their electrical engineers and form a strike team to take out Jen-Hsun Huang.

I like the way you think. :thumbsup:

 

[desprado]

Why is this here? They are going to release their new 300 series of graphic cards, whether its 3-4-5 months from now it doesn't matter.

In the mean time they can release a refined 290x, everyone knows the reference design on these cards is really poor, but they can use very high quality parts, high quality cooler, apply all the knowledge and experience and come out with a 290 Ultra.

The 290 Ultra will have higher core clock, higher memory clock and higher boost clock, with the new quality parts being used they can reduce power consumption and temperature and to top it off with high quality cooler to keep the card extremely cool and quiet they can compete with Nvidia again.

The percentage of Mid range Pc user is much higher so they wont even look at R9 290 at $280 because it massive power hungry and hot also they have much better choice which is GTX 970 which is cooler,less noise,best high end card ever in term of performance per watt and of course less power hungry.

 

[hawtdawg]

How old are most of you guys? AMD(ATI) and Nvidia have been one-upping each other to this degree every other generation or 2 for over a decade.

 

[desprado]

AMD's software developers working on Mantle should take over chip design?

Good idea. Then they could take their electrical engineers and form a strike team to take out Jen-Hsun Huang.

I like the way you think. :thumbsup:

AMD said that Mantle is only based with GCN so if they carry GCN than it is safe to say that there GPUs will fail like there CPUs.

 

[Subyman]

Why is this here? They are going to release their new 300 series of graphic cards, whether its 3-4-5 months from now it doesn't matter.

In the mean time they can release a refined 290x, everyone knows the reference design on these cards is really poor, but they can use very high quality parts, high quality cooler, apply all the knowledge and experience and come out with a 290 Ultra.

The 290 Ultra will have higher core clock, higher memory clock and higher boost clock, with the new quality parts being used they can reduce power consumption and temperature and to top it off with high quality cooler to keep the card extremely cool and quiet they can compete with Nvidia again.

Rapping out the 290X and adding cost, as you say, is not a good way to compete with the very efficient 980. The 290 Ultra would be nearly 300W, 512-bit bus, with high quality parts trying to compete with a GK204 part. It won't end well, the costs are so incredibly different between those two parts that AMD will pretty much be breaking even on each sale where Nvidia is feeding its R&D engine.

AMD's approach of strapping an AIO to a power hungry chip doesn't work well, look at the FX9590...

 

[Subyman]

How old are most of you guys? AMD(ATI) and Nvidia have been one-upping each other to this degree every other generation or 2 for over a decade.

It's definitely changed over the years. You could have said the same thing 3-4 years ago with AMD and Intel. Once you start to get behind in R&D, there isn't much you can do to catch up. I'm rooting for AMD, but buying Nvidia because of the obvious benefits.

 

[dn7309]

having power efficiency is not a big deal for me when I buy a flagship GPU.

I want raw performance at the cost of heat and efficiency. If AMD can get next gen GPU out with a closed loop cooler that can stay cool and quiet and outperform Nvidia by a noticeable margin, I'd get that AMD card.

 

[Zodiark1593]

AMD said that Mantle is only based with GCN so if they carry GCN than it is safe to say that there GPUs will fail like there CPUs.

If this is true, then it must also be true that DX11 can only work with one architecture.

Anyway, I eagerly await to see AMD's answer. It will only be bad for everyone if AMD can't bring anything to compete with Maxwell.

 

[sontin]

AMD's biggest problem is the feature set and not perf/watt in the desktop market. It is the first time that nVidia is beat them on every possible feature.
With 4x 4k Monitor support, DX11 FL11_3, better VR support, H.265 encoding, official downsampling... they are so far ahead.

Price alone wont cut it anymore. A GX970 is to cheap that AMD could really convince people them with a lower price.

 

[Subyman]

having power efficiency is not a big deal for me when I buy a flagship GPU.

I want raw performance at the cost of heat and efficiency. If AMD can get next gen GPU out with a closed loop cooler that can stay cool and quiet and outperform Nvidia by a noticeable margin, I'd get that AMD card.

You'd really take few more frames over a cooler, quieter, less expensive to run PC? If the card comes with an AIO and is pushing the architecture to the limit to compete with nvidia, then there probably will be no room left for an OC, so you are really paying for AMD to push your card to the edge from the factory.

 

[Lyfer]

The only thing they got going for them is xbone and ps4 holiday sales are incoming.

 

[hawtdawg]

It's definitely changed over the years. You could have said the same thing 3-4 years ago with AMD and Intel. Once you start to get behind in R&D, there isn't much you can do to catch up. I'm rooting for AMD, but buying Nvidia because of the obvious benefits.

I don't feel that this is a fair analogy. AMD only ever had an appreciable lead on Intel during the Netburst era. Intel has gained a big part of its advantage by being extremely successful on the fab end of things. If they were both using the same fab process, they'd be much closer.

Also, CPU's are much much more complicated. Release a dud CPU architecture, and you're behind for a decade. Release a dud GPU architecture, and you can turn it around in a year or 2. We've seen both ATI/AMD and Nvidia do it multiple times.

 

[desprado]

AMD's biggest problem is the feature set and not perf/watt in the desktop market. It is the first time that nVidia is beat them on every possible feature.
With 4x 4k Monitor support, DX11 FL11_3, better VR support, H.265 encoding, official downsampling... they are so far ahead.

Price alone wont cut it anymore. A GX970 is to cheap that AMD could really convince people them with a lower price.

that is the point.

GTX 970 has better driver support,less heating,best in performance per watt,best in overclocking,Dx12 and DX11.3 features,less power consumption and the best thing is that it is priced at $330 and right now i can see is that R9 290 is selling at around $400 were it dont justify.

Nvidia GTX 970 did not leave any space for AMD R9 290/X.