What will be AMD'S next Move?

[Cloudfire777]

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.

Yeah but they have been relying mostly on new better nodes to shove in more transistors. Newer nodes have become more complicated over the years which is why we are still at 28nm and not 20nm. FinFETs are needed to make it worth the jump to a new node. 16nm FinFET isnt ready until late 2015, and its not 16nm but 20nm. Why do you think the 500mm2 GPU is coming from AMD? If it was 20nm it would have been substantial smaller.

Look at Intel and the huge problems they have with 14nm. They will be a year behind schedule when we get high end Broadwell. That is the company with the most advanced equipment and most experienced staff.
TSMC on the other hand regulary mess up, have customers like Qualcomm threatening to produce their chips at Samsung or Intel fabs instead. If Intel have huge problems with newer nodes, yoy can bet your money on that TSMC will too.

So Nvidia have been adapting to this. They now have managed to overcome this with a much more efficient architecture on the existing node. AMD have shown no signs of this, with the recent big launch of R9 285 thats nowhere near in efficiency to Maxwell. In fact Gibbo said AMD had the next generation cards ready in August this year. And he was reffering to Tonga...
So believe it or not, the 500mm2+ GPU with all signs pointing toward a hotter GCN card (no 20nm availabilty, Asetek making the cooling needed), is whats coming from AMD.

This is AMD playing the "more cores, massive TDP" they have been doing against Intel for several years now. This is very bad news

 

[Erenhardt]

What if AMD is going to release 300Watt TDP GCN2.0 @ 20nm 500mm2 monster with liquid cooler? Isn't that a possiblity? Or does liquid cooling = scaled up hawaii?

Where would that put latest nv cards?

 

[mindbomb]

they need a full tonga that is priced aggressively below the 970

 

[Attic]

I think after reading Tom's hardware writeup on the 970/980 power usage and his conclusion that there's no magic architectural design that was making them less power hungry, AMD should go back and fine tune their powertune.

This.

For current stock, drop prices with Shadow of Mordor game bundle +2 other game choice for 290 290x 295x2 buyers. There's still a pretty rigorous used market for cheap 290 and 290x's from what I saw before selling my last 290. Lot of folks want that performance for well under $300 and are getting it.

Power on 290/290x vs 970/980 is getting overdone IMO. Definate big advantage to nVidia here, but doesn't mean that folks are going to place power over a cheaper alternative. The non reference 290 and 290x are excellent cards still if priced and bundled right vs the 970/980.

Best thing about the new nVidia release is price for me. The $329 970 is great, performance 2nd, power third. In that Trinity it's a huge win (AMD can definitively take away one of those aspects). I'd say for AMD the 290 will need to drop to $299 max and get a WORTHWHILE game bundle.

290's at 1100+/1500 clocks are still going to compete well against the 970 OC from what I can tell. Lot of reviews (if not all) are showing 947/1250 290's vs the 970.

We'll get some users running these head to head soon enough.


I'm surprised AMD has not dropped prices yet, there's nothing to buy from them *new* in the high end right now. I expect them to swing pretty hard and connect next launch. nVidia just had a big inning in this game.

 

[Fox5]

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.

ATI with almost no money or previous design wins Conroe'd Nvidia with the 9700 pro, nvidia caught up with the 6000 series but then ATI was pulling ahead more and more until the Geforce 8000 series, which Conroe'd ATI back.
AMD then caught up again the 4000 series, and Geforce 400 and 500 series were both poor compared to AMD's equivalents.
And more recently, the Geforce 600 and 700 series have been pretty comparable to their AMD counterparts, albeit with nvidia having a ton to market advantage before the comparable AMD response comes out.

Maxwell does seem like a big jump in power efficiency though, so it'll be interesting if AMD has something in the works to match it, or if they just wait for 20nm.

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.

During the Pentium 3/Pentium 4 time frame, AMD had both an architectural and a fab advantage for a time. The Athlon uarch was just more powerful than the the Pentium Pro uarch, and the Netburst uarch had major short-comings despite being more advanced in a variety of ways. AMD also had copper interconnects first, had SOI when Intel didn't have anything comparable, and I think was first or close behind intel from 180nm to 90nm. Then they bought a GPU company instead of investing in their fabs or their cpu architecture.

 

[Creig]

As has been stated, AMD will counter with price drops as they deem necessary and will continue working on their next gen architecture. Once that comes out, then it will be Nvidia's turn to drop prices while working on their next card.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

It's really no big deal.

 

[AtenRa]

Why people believe that $300+ GPUs will bring AMD down ??? Even if AMD doesnt have a $300 GPU (like the HD3xxx andHD4xxx days), they could make a lot of profit with Tonga and lower die GPUs until they will launch their next GPU. Also Hawaii is being sold as a high margin GPGPU card so they still making money from them.

 

[rusina]

ATI with almost no money or previous design wins Conroe'd Nvidia with the 9700 pro, nvidia caught up with the 6000 series but then ATI was pulling ahead more and more until the Geforce 8000 series, which Conroe'd ATI back.

It's intresting that ATi was losing a lot of money during those times when they seemed to be ahead. Maybe it was because ATi's GPUs were more expensive to make and they used aggressive pricing to stay in competition..or Nvidia's mid range was better than ATi's.. or both.
-----

At the moment AMD needs new architecture. Yes Radeon R9 295X2 is still the fastest card out and this >500mm^2 Tonga-GPU with water cooling can be fastest single chip solution..but this doesn't work with cheaper cards. If your card uses less wattage you can save costs on cooling and power components. Also PC system builders will like smaller heat production..since it cuts costs again.

Things will simply get crazy with laptop computers! These machines have huge potential and Nvidia already has GM107 and GM108 based products out there. They'll also have high end when GM204 based (970M and 980M) mobile cards are out there..first performance numbers are just insane, but expected.


Imagine what happens when Nvidia has GM206 ready with specs that go half way between GM107 and GM204?

 

[parvadomus]

The answer is simple, AMD will bring something on par with it. This has happened always in GPU history. Current AMD GPUs are too fat, the shaders can do both FP64 + FP32 and that wastes die space and probably dont allows them to clock that high with enough efficiency. They obviously went to allin HPC market since the original GCN design, and they are making nice progress to get into there.
But the story is always the same:
AMD kicked NV ass in efficiency with evergreen vs fermi -> NV begins to focus in efficiency since then.
AMD developed eyefinity -> NV did the same
NV was great in compute with fermi -> AMD did the same since GCN
NV kicks AMD in efficiency -> AMD is obviously working at it since Kepler or maybe even since the first Maxwell silicon

I suspect they can even "debug" their competitors GPUs and copy algorithms such the memory delta color compression they both are talking about lately (obviously AMD made a first time copy of NVs one).
The cicle will continue indefinitely since GPU partes are very simple (not like CPUs which are much more complex).

 

[rgallant]

Here's what I think AMD is going to do next:
Step #1: Major price drops on existing cards so that they're remotely competitive
Step #2: Release full-fat Tonga (R9 285X) at $249
Step #3: Release an absurdly oversized and power-hungry R9 390X with closed-loop water cooling. This will be designed to appeal to gamers who want the absolute best single-card performance and don't care about power consumption.
Step #4: Move to 20nm as soon as possible, hopefully in conjunction with improved PowerTune and/or a fully revamped GCN 2.0 architecture

#4
what's is the status of GF 20nm ?
-any chance for jan.2015 giving amd a 6 month lead with 20 nm.

 

[exar333]

AMD just got 'Conroe'd' (again).

 

[KompuKare]

Then they bought a GPU company instead of investing in their fabs or their cpu architecture.

Yes, a cross licence deal with ATI would have been x100 better for both companies. I guess they wanted more influence on the design for their APUs. Problem is, they called the importance of APUs correctly but then had no money left to actually get the work done. Something like Llano should have been out years earlier.

As for how to respond to GM204? Well there have been good ideas in this thread. I think they really need to do something about power gating or even removing the DP performance on their gaming cards. 'Free' DP is all very well, but since they have so little HPC marketshare, it seems silly to cripple their gaming cards with this stuff.

While I think AMD generally get excellent results for their R&D (for instance the idle power usage of their APUs was very good long before Intel got to something similar with Haswell), AMD's small R&D budget shows up in some things not getting fixed. For instance, their GPUs have good idle but as soon as you use more than one monitor it gets a lot worse. Nvidia's multi-monitor desktop power usage is much better (and Intel's is even better still: my Ivy Bridge's HD4000 uses almost no more power with two monitors than with one and AFAIK three monitors is the same).
Another sign of limited R&D is the way they gave up on FX. A new chipset or a port of Steamroller might not have generated much a return but it would at least show they were still in that market plus an Opteron version might sell a bit for those who specific loads where CMT is a good fit.

 

[StereoPixel]

http://videocardz.com/52764/amd-teasing-new-product-is-it-radeon

 

[Cloudfire777]

Neither AMD_roy, AMD or AMD Radeon on twitter writes anything about it. Only AMD India ??

 

[3DVagabond]

What really i think is that AMD really need to focus on there gpu power consumption and efficiency even if they have to sacrifice a bit of performance and make it cheaper is they only key to survive.

I'm interested in there being more info provided to see if Tom's opinions carry any weight, that the impressive efficiency of Maxwell is software based rather than architectural. Too soon to say yet, but if that's how it's done then AMD doesn't really need to change anything, but in software (possibly). If it's in the hardware and AMD hasn't already addressed it, then there's nothing they can really do except continue on.

 

[3DVagabond]

but it will consume more power though.Even know i am seeing in forums that AMD user are also demanding for efficiency and lower power consumption.People who have mid range rigs wont even look at R9 290X or R9 290 because it consume a lot power and not enough efficient like GTX 970.

I sure that everyone will agree that right now GTX 970 is the best choice for any Mid range or high end user.

You ask for no flames and start a thread to ask what people think AMD's next move is, but you can't resist turning it into an nVidia sales pitch.

I'm out until you decide you want to be the least bit open.

 

[wand3r3r]

I would think that if NV figured out a great way to reduce the consumption with software, they would put it in the quadro cards immediately to sell them on efficiency. I don't believe it's (purely) software.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Why people believe that $300+ GPUs will bring AMD down ???

These are the typical differences between the $200-250 and $320-350 level:

This is what we have now:
(They don't have the 970 up but it's 780 Ti level)

Besides the typical price/performance dropoff, the jump to the next level is generally accompanied by increased PSU and cooling requirements. So you're looking at additional expenses making it even a worse purchase. The 970/980 completely avoid this.
Before the GTX 970, everything (except drivers) pointed to the pocket of the 270X, 280, and 280X. Now everything points to the GTX 970 and points HARD.

 

[escrow4]

Even if AMD responds, picture Maxwell on 20nm. Intel has spanked AMD for years on the CPU side and now Nvidia is ripping into the GPU side. My first GPU was AMD and I occasionally moved back but not now. Nvidia is where its all at. Once you have the perception and the products its all over.

 

[Erenhardt]

This is too funny! I don't remember people saying nv being 'conroed' by amd when GCN released.
NV releases their new arch first - suddenly amd is out of business.

http://videocardz.com/52764/amd-teasing-new-product-is-it-radeon

That looks like hawaii blower doing plasma vortex.
Also amd may be re-scheduling their release dates:

Do they claim that they don't need steroids/Viagra

 

[AtenRa]

Besides the typical price/performance dropoff, the jump to the next level is generally accompanied by increased PSU and cooling requirements. So you're looking at additional expenses making it even a worse purchase. The 970/980 completely avoid this.
Before the GTX 970, everything (except drivers) pointed to the pocket of the 270X, 280, and 280X. Now everything points to the GTX 970 and points HARD.

Sorry but R9 285 can be found at 209 euros, GTX 970 can be found at 309 euros and GTX 760 at 192 euros. All of them can use the same PSU. You are acting like there is only a single card in the market and that is the GTX970.
Sorry but $300+ GPU market is 10-15% only, you can make a profit without even engage in that segment and stay bellow the $300 mark.

 

[AtenRa]

Also, for 6 months NVIDIA was struggling to release GF100 Fermi and when they did, lots and lots of people bought the GPU no matter if it was 300W because it was 10-15% faster than HD5870.

 

[Atreidin]

This all seems blown out of proportion by people starved for action in the video card market.

 

[Black Octagon]

AMD's next move will be to outshine NV. Then NV will outshine AMD. Then AMD. Then NV. Rinse and repeat, again and again, ad nauseum. The prices may change. What is unlikely to change is the internet forum drama

 

[alexruiz]

I don't think many of the people painting doom and gloom realize that GCN made it into retail 3 years ago. ATI, I mean, AMD's GPU division surely has had a lot of time to keep polishing the successor, which was already under way when GCN debuted. That surely is quite some time to refine a design.
Performance? It has been in the mind of everyone.
Power efficiency? You bet they have had it in mind

The GTX 970 is a great card, likely the GTX 960 will be also, but painting them as the death of the competition is exaggeration. Personally, for next AMD's move I am expecting something incredible, but then, I am an AMD fanboy