(08-17-2017, 08:42 AM)RolloTheGreat Wrote: OK but they were PR at NVIDIA as well. I'm not saying PR/marketing is irrelevant, but I'm saying the hires AMD needs to make are like the ArtX acquisition.

Engineers not at one of the bigger firms for some reason.

Or they fire 100 office staff and hire 10 good engineers away from bigger firms.

They need engineering excellence now above all else.

(08-17-2017, 09:18 AM)gstanford Wrote: I'm not so sure.  GPU's may be simple in principle to design, but if you aren't careful they end up like the last few generations of AMD GPU's - large, hot power hungry and useless compared to the competition.

The serious GPU market shook out to two players faster than the CPU market did if you think about it.  If GPU's were so straight forward and easy there ought to be more players left standing.

Good engineers just don't want to work for AMD.  If Al Bundy were an engineer he'd work for them......

Quote:This move from AMD could open up a proverbial can of worms, however, in the sense that it may start to look like AMD's focus isn't on gaming anymore. This makes sense - the only focus of any company is to make money - so the fact that AMD is tapping the mining market with increased, more predictable performance and longevity isn't strange. This is especially true if one considers Vega's current positioning against NVIDIA's parts, if current pricing trends remain. This move from the company, while sensible from an economic perspective - a graphics card sold is a graphics card sold, period - may bring the company some pushback from gamers, who simply want to be able to purchase AMD's graphics cards for their historically-intended purpose - gaming. That is already hard to do - nigh impossible - at MSRP prices for AMD's most recent architectures. And Vega seems to be going down the same road.

(08-17-2017, 06:14 PM)RolloTheGreat Wrote:

(08-17-2017, 09:18 AM)gstanford Wrote: I'm not so sure.  GPU's may be simple in principle to design, but if you aren't careful they end up like the last few generations of AMD GPU's - large, hot power hungry and useless compared to the competition.

The serious GPU market shook out to two players faster than the CPU market did if you think about it.  If GPU's were so straight forward and easy there ought to be more players left standing.

Good engineers just don't want to work for AMD.  If Al Bundy were an engineer he'd work for them......

I don't think GPUs are simple to design in any way.

That is why I think AMD could succeed with the right hires. Engineers are labor just like anyone else, they're just "rock star/pro athlete" type labor. There are not many who can do the job at the level they do it.

As such, they are for sale. You think a guy making $5m working for NVIDIA wouldn't take $10m to work for AMD?

Also, like rock stars and athletes, there is always a pool of people who want that $5m salary who haven't proved themselves yet who can be hired much cheaper and may be the next rock star chip designer.

And there are people at NVIDIA/intel/Qualcomm/Samsung/Apple who didn't get promotions and might be willing to jump for raise or promotion.

Last, there are no "Al Bundys" in microchip design. If a person can do that job at any level they are far above you and I intellectually.

GStan, you and I are the "Al Bundys" of the tech world. Designing GPUs is basically magic to oafs like us.

(08-18-2017, 05:00 PM)gstanford Wrote: You are more than welcome to go purchase a Vega and put it in your system if you want.  I won't care.  I might snigger, but I don't care.

Me, I'll stick with the best on the market in performance, power consumption, drivers, developer support and many more metrics besides.  second best has no place in my system.

And even if AMD could magically match nvidia in all the above I'd still support nvidia before I'd throw so much as a breadcrumb at the morally and ethically depraved morons that work for AMD.

No brown ice on my Hisense thanks very much.

(08-18-2017, 04:50 PM)gstanford Wrote: If AMD aren't the best then they should quit claiming that they are.



Of course, AMD suffers from the same self-aggrandizing overblown, blowhard, competition bashing ego that you do, Trollo.

(08-19-2017, 08:03 PM)gstanford Wrote: Normally I couldn't care less about a company being second best in a market, for most commodity style things that is precisely the sort of product I would go for.

However, the video card market is different.  The quality of the video card and its drivers is very important to me there because it impacts directly upon the quality of the games I want to play and I am prepared to pay more to get better quality and reliability in this case.

We both know that AMD's products are nowhere near as polished and refined as nvidia's when it comes to both software and hardware.

Also in the discrete video card market as it exists today, 2nd best is merely a polite way of saying dead last given that there are only two entrants in the race (and only one I would consider, the other I wouldn't touch with a 1000 foot barge pole).

Quote:It turns out that retailers might not be the ones making a quick buck at this madness. Leaked invoices show that distributors (entities that supply inventory to retailers) have inflated prices even at their level. A San Jose-based distributor, Ma Laboratories Inc., is quoting USD $675 per unit of a reference-design (not Limited Edition), Radeon RX Vega 64 SKU to a computer store. The $499 price AMD launched the RX Vega 64 at, is supposed to be the end-user price (minus government taxes). The retailer we're in touch with confirmed that they were offered no volume pricing discount due to low stock at the distributor itself. A distributor should ideally sell the product to a retailer at a much lesser price than $499, so the retailer can make their margin. The higher up the supply-chain, the more control AMD gets. The company is in a better position to rein in on distributors than retailers. If distributors are inflating prices with apparent impunity, it wouldn't surprise us if this goes even higher up.

Can AMD do anything about this? It can work with AIB partners to significantly increase production to bring down prices. But that would be a huge gamble, which will either work, putting cards in the hands of gamers at the prices they were promised; or won't, by creating more miners; or worse still, end up as bankruptcy-causing unsold inventories, if the mining craze were to somehow subside.

There is another option AMD can try, in our opinion. It can re-launch RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 as new SKUs which come with crippled cypto-currency mining abilities (a special BIOS or something driver-level, or even something at the silicon-level), and discontinue the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64. The new SKUs could be clearly advertised as not being meant for crypto-currency mining (so as to deter false-marketing lawsuits). This is important for AMD, because the Radeon brand is under threat.

Quote:I would note that AMD doesn't "have" to make NVs R&D budget, they have to hire well. Have you seen the movie "Moneyball"?

Quote:I think AMD just needs to hold on, sell some Vegas, and that for a while Ryzen and consoles are going to be funding the graphics division.

Quote:AMD made too much of an investment in graphics and graphics are too intertwined with CPUs these days for AMD to just walk away.

Quote:Last, there are no "Al Bundys" in microchip design. If a person can do that job at any level they are far above you and I intellectually.

(08-26-2017, 02:11 AM)SickBeast Wrote: Rollo speak for yourself.  I have a near genius IQ.  I don't need you telling me how intelligent I am.  If you knew all the ins and outs of all I have accomplished in my life you would not be comparing me to some kind of grunt engineer that doesn't know what he's doing.

(08-26-2017, 04:53 AM)SickBeast Wrote: What was ben's tech website called?

Quote:Rollo speak for yourself. I have a near genius IQ. I don't need you telling me how intelligent I am.

Quote:What was ben's tech website called?

(08-26-2017, 07:46 AM)BenSkywalker Wrote:

Quote:Rollo speak for yourself. I have a near genius IQ. I don't need you telling me how intelligent I am.

I think you are misinterpreting what he is saying. As a simple matter of profession, it is a fairly safe wager that you have far more formal education in developmental psychology than the rest of us do. On that topic you would likely humiliate the average person, despite it not being your primary focus, it is relevant in your field and something that is going to be required for a strong footing. Now, I know a lot of people who work on microprocessor design, *none* of them have any sort of education in developmental psychology at all. If we were sitting in a room with my assembled acquaintances which include employees at Imagination Technologies, Apple, AMD, nVidia and a startup that hasn't released anything yet and the conversation turned to that particular topic, you would be the smartest person in the room, and it wouldn't be close, for the subject at hand.

(08-26-2017, 05:08 PM)RolloTheGreat Wrote:

(08-26-2017, 07:46 AM)BenSkywalker Wrote:

Quote:Rollo speak for yourself. I have a near genius IQ. I don't need you telling me how intelligent I am.

I think you are misinterpreting what he is saying. As a simple matter of profession, it is a fairly safe wager that you have far more formal education in developmental psychology than the rest of us do. On that topic you would likely humiliate the average person, despite it not being your primary focus, it is relevant in your field and something that is going to be required for a strong footing. Now, I know a lot of people who work on microprocessor design, *none* of them have any sort of education in developmental psychology at all. If we were sitting in a room with my assembled acquaintances which include employees at Imagination Technologies, Apple, AMD, nVidia and a startup that hasn't released anything yet and the conversation turned to that particular topic, you would be the smartest person in the room, and it wouldn't be close, for the subject at hand.

How is it that you understood exactly what I was saying and the person with the genius IQ did not?

I bet you agree with me on the industry setting up this conceit as well as you have probably been to their press conferences and received their press kits. What better way to sell the product than get the public talking about the dumbed down bullet points on internet forums while pretending to be junior engineers?

"Willikers! 15% more memory bandwidth with GDDR666! I need that!" while the bandwidth of GDDR665 may not have been close to saturated and GPU tech not even close to saturating it.

There's no shame in not having highly specialized knowledge that requires years to acquire, but there is some in calling the people who are world class at it "Al Bundys" and "grunts" especially when one's own profession isn't exactly rocket science. (and this stuff is)

Pride goeth before the fall SB? Personally I think a big component of intelligence is the ability to recognize what you DON'T know. You may be the world's foremost authority in child development psychology, but that would almost certainly mean you're a neophyte here. (because you're spent your time and effort on the development psychology)

Quote:From the lowest to the highest average clock rate, we observe an increase of 36.4%. However, gaming performance goes up by just 21.1%. That's not great scaling, but it's not terrible either. What's more important is the power consumption accompanying those numbers. Unfortunately, this is where the data gets ugly.

Using the secondary BIOS with a power limit reduced by 25% gets us 159.4W and 32.7 FPS. Compared to the stock settings, just 71.6% of the power consumption serves up 89% of the gaming performance.

Going back to a worst-case scenario, the overclocked card averages 39.6 FPS, but consumes 310.6W doing so. Trading 39.5% more power consumption for an 8%-higher frame rate isn’t acceptable. The efficiency curve drops off rapidly with increasing clock rates and the additional power those frequencies necessitate.

The spread between the lowest to the highest power consumption is a massive 94%, while gaming performance increases by only 21.1%. Almost double the power consumption for one-fifth more gaming performance is what we'd call catastrophic.
...
The difference in noise between the card running at its lowest and highest clock rate is a massive 12.3 dB(A).

We discussed this fan's acoustic profile in our AMD Radeon Vega RX 64 8GB Review. Beyond the secondary BIOS' Power Save mode, Radeon RX Vega 56's noise level is unacceptable as well. The reference Radeon R9 290X, which made it even further beyond the 50 dB(A) mark, is really the only graphics card that does worse.

If the fan speed limit was removed completely for our overclocking efforts, then the card would actually exceed 60 dB(A), compelling you to run the other direction.

The noise spectrum of the secondary BIOS' profiles appear in order of quietest to AMD's hurricane simulation.
...
Radeon RX Vega 56 is a close derivative of Vega 64, so its behaviors largely carry over from AMD’s flagship. The company does cut this card’s board power rating by almost 30% through a combination of disabling eight Compute Units, dialing down the GPU’s frequency, and down-clocking its precious HBM2. But it’s ultimately still much more power-hungry, and consequently hotter and louder, than its primary competition, GeForce GTX 1070.

Performance-wise, Radeon RX Vega 56 fares well against the 1070. Even when we compare it to EVGA’s overclocked GeForce GTX 1070 SC Gaming 8GB (there are no Founders Edition cards left to buy), Vega 56 consistently matches or beats it. In the handful of scenarios where AMD is slower, the loss amounts to single-digit percentages. But whereas Vega 64 made a case for 4K gaming at dialed-back detail settings, it’s safer to think of Vega 56 as a solid solution for 2560x1440 displays at maximum quality in the latest games.

Our VR benchmarks are less conclusive. GeForce GTX 1070 is definitely faster than Vega 56 in Chronos and DiRT Rally. It’s technically quicker in Robo Recall as well, though the GeForce also suffers more dropped frames in that game. Serious Sam narrowly favors Vega 56 over GTX 1070, and Arizona Sunshine runs well on both cards.

There’s no way to be delicate about our environmental measurements, though. Despite a much lower board power than Vega 64, Radeon RX Vega 56 (using its default Balanced power profile) consumes ~220W in our typical gaming workload. You can overclock for nominal performance gains, but power consumption rises much faster, thrashing efficiency. Alternatively, you can drop Vega 56’s power limit, cut consumption dramatically, and retain most of the card’s performance. This just wasn’t an option for AMD’s shipping configuration—the company knew it had to beat GeForce GTX 1070 in the benchmarks, and it sacrificed the FPS/watt sweet-spot we calculated for a victory in the discipline gamers care about most: speed.

Beyond the tangibles—performance, power, heat, noise, and efficiency—it’s much more difficult to say whether Radeon RX Vega 56 should be your next graphics card. Weeks after its official debut, Vega 64 remains relatively rare. Those cards we do find in stock sell for ~$700—roughly 40% higher than AMD’s purported launch price and well beyond what any gamer should consider paying.
...
There are still several Vega-specific features that could make this card faster or more capable in the future: Rapid Packed Math, primitive shaders, the Draw Stream Binning Rasterizers, and the HBCC. This is also a youthful product, and there are many examples of AMD’s driver team extracting more performance from new hardware over the course of months. Our Doom, The Division, and Warhammer benchmarks should be evidence of Vega’s potential. But until we see some of those forward-looking features exposed for gamers to enjoy, Vega 56’s success will largely depend on its price relative to GeForce GTX 1070.

Quote:The primary takeaway is that CUs are far less impacting to performance on Vega than raw clocks. In some tests, we didn’t even have to bypass the power limit in order to surpass stock V64 – but doing so helps keep up as V64 becomes overclocked, something we’ll look into more later. A 50% offset and modest 9% / 980MHz OC gets us to V64 performance levels. In some games, the extra 50% power (going to 100% offset, increasing current to 30-33A at 12.3V) pushes us toward and into double-digit percentage gains over the V56 OC, while other games give us ~7-8%. It just depends on the game, turns out, but results are promising in some instances.

One thing we’ve learned for sure is that V64 is hardly worth a consideration. Fifteen to twenty minutes overclocking even a reference V56 – let alone a partner model – gets us to V64 stock performance. The power mods just make it that much better. They’re probably not worth it in 95% of use cases, but the fact that AMD provided an insanely over-built VRM really does invite the play. Might as well make use of it.

Quote:Now granted, Vega's strength in mining tasks - Ethereum in particular - stems mainly from the card's usage of HBM2 memory, as well as a wide architecture with its 4096 stream processors. By setting the core clocks to 1000 MHz, the HBM2 memory clock at 1100 MHz, and power target at -24%, Reddit user S1L3N7_D3A7H was able to leverage Vega's strengths in Ethereum's PoW (Proof of Work) algorithm, achieving 43 MH/s with just 130 W of power (104 W of these for the core alone.) For comparison, tweaked RX 580 graphics cards usually deliver around 30 MH/s with 75 W core power, which amounts to around 115 W power draw per card. So Vega is achieving 43% more hash rate with a meager 13% increase in power consumption - a worthy trade-off if miners have ever seen one. This means that Vega 64 beats RX 580 cards in single node hashrate density, meaning that miners can pack more of these cards in a single system for a denser configuration with much increased performance over a similarly specced RX 580-based mining station. This was even achieved without AMD's special-purpose Beta mining driver, which has seen reports of graphical corruption and instability - the scenario could improve for miners even more with a stable release.

Moreover, S1L3N7_D3A7H said he could probably achieve the same mining efficiency on a Vega 56, which isn't all that unbelievable - memory throughput is king in Ethereum mining, so HBm2 could still be leveraged in that graphics card. It seems that at least some of that initial Vega 64 stock went into some miner's hands, as expected. And with these news, I think we'd be forgiven for holding out to our hats in the expectation of increased Vega stock (at the original $499 for Vega 64 and $399 for Vega 56 MSRP) come October. Should the users' claims about RX Vega 56 efficiency be verified, and coeteris paribus in the mining algorithms landscape for the foreseeable future, then we can very much wait for respectable inventory until Navi enters the scene.

Quote:When TechPowerUp released GPU-Z v2.3.0 earlier this week, AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 users who had flashed their graphics cards with the video BIOS of the higher RX Vega 64, discovered that their stream processor count had shot up from 3,584 to higher counts under 4,096. Some of these users felt it more or less explained the performance jump experienced after the BIOS flash. Some users even saw wrong stream processor-counts of their untouched RX Vega 56 reference-design cards. TechPowerUp GPU-Z v2.3.0 incorrectly reports the stream processor count of flashed RX Vega 56 graphics cards, and some RX Vega 56 graphics cards out of the box; due to some under-the-hood bug in the way it reads the registers of AMD's new GPUs. We are working on an update to GPU-Z, which will fix this bug.

Quote:Over the past couple of months, inflation in AMD Radeon GPU prices, in part fueled by silicon shortages, and in part by non-gamers (read: crypto-currency miners) buying up graphics cards, have impacted the AMD Radeon brand in the eyes of its target audience - PC gamers and graphics professionals. It was initially believed that market forces are driving the inflation, and that AMD had little to do with the price inflation. We then uncovered a clue that not just end-users, but even retailers are being sold AMD Radeon graphics cards at prices way above AMD's launch SEP. A Tweet by an official AMD Twitter handle shows that inflated AMD Radeon graphics card prices has the company's official sanction.

"@AMDGaming," a verified Twitter handle held by AMD, which promotes the company's products targeted at gamers, such as AMD Radeon graphics cards, and Ryzen processors; posted a promotion in which an XFX branded Radeon RX 570 graphics card, which is being sold at USD $279, including a free coupon for a "Quake Champions" pack free, was made to appear as if at its price, it's a great deal. The RX 570 was launched at USD $169 for the 4 GB variant, and $199 for the 8 GB variant. The XFX Radeon RX 570 4 GB RS (the card being marketed in the Tweet) was launched at $179. The Tweet was met with angry reactions for how blatantly AMD was marketing price-inflated Radeon graphics cards, without actually doing something about taming the prices.

Quote:Due to these factors, it seems that AMD is looking to change manufacturers for both their chip yield issues, and packaging yield problems. ASE, which has seen a 10% revenue increase for the month of August (not coincidentally, the month that has seen AMD's RX Vega release) is reportedly being put in charge of a much smaller number of packaging orders, with Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL), who has already taken on some Vega 10 packaging orders of its own, being the one to receive the bulk of Vega 11 orders. Vega 11 is expected to be the mainstream version of the Vega architecture, replacing Polaris' RX 500 series. Reports peg Vega 11 as also including HBM2 memory in their design instead of GDDR5 memory. Considering AMD's HBM memory history with both the original Fury and and now RX Vega, as well as the much increased cost of HBM2's implementation versus a more conventional GDDR memory subsystem, this editor reserves itself the right to be extremely skeptical that this is true. If it's indeed true, and Vega 11 indeed does introduce HBM2 memory to the mainstream GPU market, then... We'll talk when (if) we get there.

As to its die yield issues, AMD is reported to be changing their main supplier for their 7 nm AI-geared Vega 20 from GlobalFoundries to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), who has already secured orders for AI chips from NVIDIA and Google. TSMC's 7nm and CoWoS (chip-on-wafer-on-substrate) capabilities have apparently proven themselves enough for AMD to change manufacturers. How this will affect AMD and GlobalFoundries' Wafer Agreement remains to be seen, but we expect AMD will be letting go of some additional payments GlobalFoundries' way.

Quote:The undertone of content pertaining to AMD GPU prices in particular, with much focus on Vega, has driven a paraphrased dialogue of “we’re trying to do what we can to stop miners from getting these cards.” Early press briefings with the company, including those conducted at the Vega press event, explicitly included phrases like “we can’t hold a gun to [retailers’] heads” to get prices lower, or discussion about getting cards into the hands of gamers, not miners. Hands clean, it’s on the retailers. Statements issued to press have indicated that AMD “has no control” over the pricing situation which, although largely true, does seem mismatched with new initiatives.

It would seem odd, for instance, that AMD’s official social media accounts should suddenly embrace these higher prices, posting tweets such as:

“Need a new GPU? Grab this @XFX_Playhard RX 570 from @BestBuy for only $279 and get the Quake Champions Pack free! http://bit.ly/2gNkI8x”

“Good news! @BestBuy has XFX Radeon RX 570s back in stock and at a great price of $279.99: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/xfx-amd-radeon”
...
AMD has now become the proverbial accessory to a crime against consumers: Best Buy might be robbing the bank, but AMD is holding the bag open as the retailer furiously stuffs it with cash. AMD’s tweets are openly encouraging – just a few months after condemnation to a room of press – these inflated prices, using phrasing that boldly includes an adverb such as “only.” The card is “only” $100 over what it was just months ago, just like it’s “only” 10% off of a price hike that’s “only” 67% higher than what it should be. It’s two-faced. Up until these tweets, the company could garner consumer support through trying to help with the demand, trying to help with the prices, and taking the consumer’s side. Now, though, it’s clear that there’s limited action behind that veneer.

We have to grant that AMD is in a tough spot: There are likely agreements in place that require cross-promotion or social exposure to either retailers or board partners (Best Buy & XFX, in this case). AMD can’t very well tell consumers to avoid Best Buy, Newegg, Amazon, or any other retailer, and can’t tell those retailers to sod off. Retailers are a critical part of the ecosystem, and AMD needs to keep ties strong with those retailers and with consumers. It all hangs in the balance, but the balance gets tilted when the company suggests one thing to consumers, then another on social media. That’s the two-facedness of it: The retailers are to blame; oh, by the way, here’s a great deal on an RX 570 for only $280.

We’d encourage our audience to not become a part of this attempt at establishing a new pricing norm. Intentional or not, AMD’s endorsement of these inflated prices helps retailers to establish that new norm, rewriting history such that consumers think prices have always been this way, and that $280 is genuinely a good deal on a once-sub-$200 product. You can always wait: Wait for supply to pick-up or wait for mining to die down. There are also alternatives, like ripping a card out of an older system (in the interim), using an IGP, buying used, or buying competing products – like the $200-$220 GTX 1060 3GB or $280 GTX 1060 6GB cards, which hold price equivalence with an RX 570. The 570 was never really meant to compete with 1060s – that’s the job of the 580, but those range up to $350 for 8GB models. The 1060 6GB cards are still running about $30 higher than they should, but that’s a far cry from a $100+ jump that’s simultaneously condemned and promoted by the maker of the product. Again, waiting is always an option, as 1060 prices are also higher than they should be.

It’s disappointing, really: We recommended the X70 series at launch, starting with the 470 and leading to the 570. The card made far more sense than a GTX 1050 Ti at $145-$165, and wasn’t that much more money. It was also reasonably close in performance to an RX 580, but $30-$60 cheaper at launch. The 1050 Ti has remained stagnant in price, with nearly all higher-tier cards climbing at least somewhat from the spiked demand. That’s nVidia and AMD alike. Some of this disappointment is just a lack of supply mixed with retailer, distributor, or board partner decisions that have driven up prices. The rest stems from AMD’s new endorsement of those prices, which certainly puts ideas in the heads of retail giants: “They’re OK with this. They’ll even promote it.”

Mining provides a cover for some of the pricing scenario, but not this. These tweets, however short the combined <280 characters may be, betray the consumer and perpetuate a new norm of video card prices. We’d suggest that consumers don’t play into this trap. Wait, buy used, buy something else, or repurpose parts. One thing's for sure: A $100 up-charge is not a sale, and it's doublethink to imply as much. That much is on the retailers.

Best Buy did not reply to a request for comment.

Quote:This is a good way of limiting access to GPUs for mining conglomerates or particularly affluent individual miners, which would otherwise - as has been the case - buy up the entire inventory. It also marks a particularly strong position from MicroCenter, since usually, for retailers and e-tailers as well as for AMD, a sale is a sale, independent of use or buyer case. The company is likely missing out on some additional orders from miners by going this route, and the fact that they are willing to do so really speaks to how strong their vision is for how the market should be behaving. Likely, it isn't that difficult to circumvent this imposed restriction - but the simple fact that it exists is of note. And while this isn't a new approach (we've seen some retailers do the same around RX Vega 64's launch), this might make it more likely for other retailers to follow suit.