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AMD unveils its Vega 10 GPU architecture
- bryanlarsen 9y agoReviewers: make sure to test mining performance of these cards. Not that we care about that, but to give us an idea of whether it'll be possible to actually buy these things.
- zrg 9y agoAMD are actually selling a portion of the GPU stock in bundles so that they don't all get snapped up by miners.
- bryanlarsen 9y agoBut will it work, or will miners gladly pay the extra $100? AMD would love that -- miners won't redeem the games or the discounts, so that extra $100 is pure profit.
- dEnigma 9y agoIs that how those bundles work? AMD only pays when the game gets activated/redeemed? I always thought they just buy a bunch of game licenses and pay upfront.
- Qwertious 9y agoMiners might want to sell the games/discounts to recoup their losses. After all, if you get a $50 discount on a $200 monitor then you can just re-sell it new for $200 and get your money back.
- TheGuyWhoCodes 9y agoWhich is US only. The only reason to buy was the bundle, which is a good deal. Same performance as 1080 at the same price with double the TDP and will have limited stock. There is no reason to buy Vega as a gamer.
- dkn 9y agoUnlikely considering 275W+ TDP
- monocasa 9y agoThey do spend a bit of the article explaining AMDs new bundling deal that looks to be explicitly anti-miner.
- mavendependency 9y agoSlide deck mentions cryptocurrency specific instructions.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoYes please, so 1080ti cards get their prices down to normal and I can buy one.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoVote me down, but Amazon.de increased prices by 30% due to Ethereum miners demand to > $1050.
- onli 9y agoThat may be, but currently it is at 760€, and a bit cheaper for worse models. https://www.amazon.de/GIGABYTE-GeForce-1080TI-Gaming-GDDR5X/dp/B06XWXQX6T https://www.amazon.de/GIGABYTE-GeForce-1080TI-Gaming-GDDR5X/... as example.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoThat card had a 650€ price mid-June before miners bought up everything, but yes 760€ is already down from the 820€ peak.
- Nursie 9y agoAFAICT the vega "Frontier" card which has been out for a little while (at a very high price) has a similar mining output to a 1080Ti The Vega frontier board is clocked faster than the Vega 64s and has twice as much RAM, and RAM bandwidth. I'm going to take a guess that these are going to be slightly less attractive to miners than the Nvidia 1070. Wouldn't like to put money on it though. --edit-- Power consumption on these will be the deciding factor, possibly. Nvidia seem to have a far better handle on that lately.
- snarfy 9y agoAMD should just run their own mining rig at this point. Create a large multisocket board and plug all those GPUs in for a week of 'burn in' mining coins before shipping them out.
- LeifCarrotson 9y agoYou think they don't?
- TheGuyWhoCodes 9y agoVega is a failure aka bulldozer 2.0 Same performance as 1080, a year later with double the TDP. Only 30% higher than the Fury which was their high end card from 2 years ago. This whole product launch was terrible from AMD laughing at Nvidia with "Poor Volta" to "blind tests" to no live streaming of the SIGGRAPH event.
- mavendependency 9y agoThey could salvage this if they can get tensorflow working.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- anilshanbhag 9y agoThat is a very pessimistic view. The GTX 1080 is $550; Vega 56 is $400 and Vega 64 is $500. With decent cooling, the vega gpus can be overclocked to give significant boost. Also the freesync monitor is cheaper than gsync. Vega56 + FreeSync will save you around $350. That is ~ 25% saving if you are going for a 1.2-1.5k$ rig.
- loeg 9y agoWhat makes you believe there is any room to overclock the Vega cards? And how much additional cost does "decent cooling" add?
- tcfunk 9y agoSure, for desktops. Poor thermals means that this line of GPUs will find it's way into exactly 0% of the laptop market, which is unfortunate.
- meesterdude 9y ago> into exactly 0% of the laptop market Alienware will find a way, even if it requires a water connection to cool it
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lawrenceyan 9y agoWith the failure of RX Vega to meet performance expectations, I fear Nvidia has free reign now to continue their dominance in the areas of deep learning / machine learning. I was really quite optimistic, especially with their recent push with the ROCm platform that AMD has been building up. But if the hardware can't back it up, it means little in the end. It seems like we'll have to wait until the next generation to see if any viable contenders will show up. Disappointing to say the least.
- lawrenceyan 9y agoI can perfectly understand if you disagree with me and am happy to discuss. But I don't feel like anything in my post was misleading or incorrect, so I'm confused as to why I'm being downvoted?
- floatboth 9y agoIt didn't meet expectations of gamers who wanted it to beat the 1080 Ti in games. But the compute performance is really good.
- lawrenceyan 9y agoEven in terms of raw compute, the current Pascal iterations like the 1080 Ti, Titan Xp, etc. perform better than the RX Vega. In addition to a significantly lower TDP par for par and an established developer environment that currently is unparalleled, much to the frustration of myself and many within the machine learning community as Nvidia has chosen to keep their software closed source, the RX Vega release to be very blunt, is a definitively disappointing result regardless of the distinction between gaming or computation. I think there is a silver lining somewhere, however, in anticipation for the next generation releases of AMD in a year or two. AMD's investment into their ROCm platform will hopefully continue and iteratively, the open source option will slowly continue to improve. By the time AMD is ready to release their Navi architecture in 2018/2019, perhaps there will be a chance to bring things back towards an equilibrium. Another contender I see in the nearer future perhaps that might be able to topple Nvidia's current monopoly on deep learning, is Google's investment into their TPU architecture. In addition to fully owning the development of TensorFlow, with the resources that Google has at its disposal, I could easily see the company investing in building out an full end-to-end alternative that takes away the current stranglehold that CUDA has. Wherever the competition comes from, I hope that it comes sooner rather than later. Closed source single option monopolies that Nvidia currently has managed to position itself into only serve to hurt the consumer.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoI really hope that AMD gets better deep learning support so it will push NVIDIA's pricing structure down. Also, AMD's processor lineup looks very appealing compared to Intel (which has had more pressure on their solutions also. (moved from dupe thread).
- KaoruAoiShiho 9y agoI'm surprised at the absolute lack of news on how Vega FE performs in deep learning...
- freeone3000 9y agoBackends for the deep learning frameworks in use are CPU or CUDA. OpenCL support is essentially non-existent. There's no point benchmarking something that isn't going to be used.
- romanovcode 9y agohttps://img.purch.com/radeon-rx-vega/o/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLmJlc3RvZm1pY3JvLmNvbS9HLzEvNjk3ODI1L29yaWdpbmFsL3BlcmYuanBn https://img.purch.com/radeon-rx-vega/o/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLmJlc... So basically $700 dollar card is worse then 1080. You can buy 1080TI for around ~$900 which would completely destroy this AMD "beast". Not sure where the hype comes from, or am I missing something?
- dragontamer 9y agoThe RX 64 is a $500 card. If a $500 card is roughly the same as a 1080 (currently $550), I think that's fair. The $700 liquid-cooled Vega should overclock better, but I have my doubts for its efficiency. Overclocking isn't very good for heat and noise and reliability.
- Dylan16807 9y agoWater cooling is pretty effective at fixing heat and noise problems, and heat is one of the big factors in reliability too.
- romanovcode 9y agoThe $900 mark was also for a card that is not stock. I was talking about ASUS Strix version which is after-market with 3 coolers.
- bryanlarsen 9y agoYou're linking to a graph that claims that a $500 card is better than a 1080. 53 fps is bigger than 45.
- romanovcode 9y agoThe $900 mark was also for a card that is not stock. I was talking about ASUS Strix version which is after-market with 3 coolers.
- ac29 9y agoAnd 78 > 76, in favor of Nvidia. But they don't list average or 99%ile performance, and manufacturer-provided benchmarks are notoriously biased, so we'll have to wait and see the independent reviews before anyone can claim performance superiority.
- nsxwolf 9y agoWho is this for then? I should just go Nvidia for my gaming rig? The RX 480 last year had an amazing price/performance ratio. It was a very exciting product for the mid range gamer. It seems with Vega they are offering slightly worse than Nvidia's high end for slightly less money. Better performance at the same price would have been compelling. Slightly worse at a bargain price would have been compelling. Plus, you won't be able to buy these anyway because of mining. This is just sad. Maybe they should just remarket themselves as a mining company.
- onli 9y agoSlightly worse for slightly cheaper could still be attractive. Factor in prices for displays with freesync display vs displays with gsync, and the price difference to Nvidia get a a lot bigger, in favor of AMD. But it depends on whether the cards will be available, and which performance will be reached.
- sundvor 9y agoIf you already have a G-Sync display, you're kind of locked in. I had super high hopes for Vega (if only to apply downwards pressure to NVIDIA's pricing), but ended upgrading from a 980 to a 1080TI a couple of months ago as the launch was dragging out. With the numbers I'm seeing, I'm glad I chose the TI, and didn't wait. I don't see NVIDIA reducing their pricing over this.
- bigtunacan 9y agoSeeing as the Vega 64 "starts at" $500 and I was able to pick up a 1080 TI for about $700 I don't see who the target audience is. If you are the part of the market that is willing to spend $500+ just for a new graphics card then you likely aren't going to get the subpar card just to save a few dollars.
- Nursie 9y agoThey may not be that attractive to miners given the higher TDP than nvidia. Guess we'll see.
- binarycrusader 9y agoOne significant advantage AMD might have is that they have chosen to provide full rate FP16 support: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-specs-availability,35112.html http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-specs... ...unlike nVidia: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-and-1070-founders-edition-review/5 http://www.anandtech.com/show/10325/the-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1... While that's something that developers have to explicitly support, it will be interesting to see what happens when they do.
- gcp 9y agoAt 21TFLOPS for 400 USD it has good potential in the machine learning field, yes. AFAIK AMD is busy pushing out support for MIOpen into Tensorflow etc.
- mamon 9y agoFor machine learning Tensor Cores in the upcoming Volta GPUs seem much better idea, delivering 120 TFLOPS. Although the price would be a multiple of 400 USD, for sure.
- jlebar 9y ago> For machine learning Tensor Cores in the upcoming Volta GPUs seem much better idea, delivering 120 TFLOPS. Yes, but the real-world benchmark numbers nvidia published show a much smaller speedup than one would expect if one looked only at the 120TFLOPS number. This is because (a) "tensor core" is just a fancy name for "fast 4x4 matmul instruction" -- it's not applicable to everything you might do on the GPU, and (b) memory bandwidth did not increase commensurate with compute speed. (I work on the XLA GPU compiler in TensorFlow.)
- strictnein 9y agoThe Radeon Pro SSG is where it's at: > "The Radeon™ Pro SSG takes it one step further by having 2TB of solid state graphics memory on board" Just insane. In a good way. https://pro.radeon.com/en-us/radeon-pro-wx-9100-and-radeon-pro-ssg/ https://pro.radeon.com/en-us/radeon-pro-wx-9100-and-radeon-p...
- foxfired 9y agoI am surprised this claim is buried in the article with no highlight whatsoever.
- hughw 9y agoDayum. Now if they would just port Thrust to OpenCL I'd be in business.
- burnte 9y agoIndeed, the non-Pro variant only gets you 512GB of mechanical memory
- neilmovva 9y ago"graphics memory" is probably not the right term here. While the Pro SSG does have 2TB of storage on board, that comes in the form of a NAND flash, PCIe SSD (from Samsung IIRC). While fast, this SSD provides single digit GB/s bandwidth at most, compared to the hundreds of GB/s of bandwidth that the DRAM-based GDDR5 or HBM provide. When we say "graphics memory," we're almost always referring to the latter, and never see more than maybe 32 GB of DRAM based memory on board.
- snuxoll 9y agoMore curious about the latency and how that impacts performance, even with DMA going over the PCIe bus to a NVMe SSD is a longer trek.
- justinclift 9y agoIsn't the "2TB" NVMe SSD (in this case) directly interfaced to the card, so not going over the system PCIe bus?
- nodesocket 9y agoJust curious any people own $AMD shares? I was surprised to learn that AMD is the second most owned company on Robinhood trading platform behind Apple. I bought in at $10.47 after last earnings absolutely destroyed it. Just sold right before current earnings at $14.12 and looking to maybe buy back in lower than I sold for. Closed today at $13.61.
- droidist2 9y agoThat's interesting, didn't know the stock was so popular on Robinhood. I remember around 2 years ago their stock price was in the $2 range and r/wallstreetbets were all talking about going "YOLO" with AMD. Pretty nice comeback for their stock. Lisa Su seems like a great CEO.
- snuxoll 9y agoLisa made a good call bringing Jim Keller back to work on Zen, an investment that seems to have paid off extremely well.
- JudasGoat 9y agoI wonder if it would be feasible to couple GPU dies similar to threadripper or EPYC.