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With AMD closing the gap with Intel competition in the CPU market is back after a ten year abscense. What I'm waiting for is an AMD GPU that can compete with a
by berbec 8y ago
With AMD closing the gap with Intel competition in the CPU market is back after a ten year abscense.
What I'm waiting for is an AMD GPU that can compete with a top-tier NVidia offering. Vega is nice, but not really a contender on the mid to top end. The G series cpus with vega inside are great, but where is the 2080ti, or even 1080ti, killer? Even something a bit slower, but close, would be great.
Is it too much to ask of AMD to handle both? I am unsure, but I would love to see NVidia in a price and performance war at the same time Intel is. Competition makes the resulting products better. Do you think the 9th Gen Intel chips would be octocore without Ryzen?
- marmaduke 8y agoIsn’t AMD well positioned to make a hybrid unit which works well as a CPU and GPU? > Do you think the 9th Gen Intel chips would be octocore without Ryzen? Recently got a new work laptop, a 12” with a 4C/8T i5. I definitely wouldn’t have expected that without Ryzen on the market, which also is available in business laptops from Dell in a 4C/8T config.
- mamon 8y agoBut is Ryzen really on the laptop market? There are just few low-end models, nothing that I would consider buying, so for laptops I'm kind of stuck with Intel.
- atq2119 8y agoI saw some pretty slick business models come out from HP. Actually held one that somebody showed me, it seemed well built. It'll obviously take time for high quality AMD-based laptops to become a normal thing, but with the CPU being en par and the GPU clearly being better than Intel's offering, it should really only be a matter of time.
- marmaduke 8y agoI think though with Dell offering laptops, desktops, and servers with AMD components the time is already here. OTOH maybe this Dell stuff isn’t on consumer market yet.
- marmaduke 8y agoYep Dell has Ryzen Pro 3/5/7 laptops, with Vega GPUs with same TDP as Intel machines. edit I almost ordered one but went with a different model to choose the keyboard layout. So my point is that they do exist.
- bitL 8y agoWell, not really, only low end and a bit of midrange. No chance to buy a trivial retina display with any Ryzen U. Like they just dump excess inventories of TN and HD IPS panels at whatever AMD has to offer, even if Ryzen U is far more suitable to 2.5k/3k/4k screens than any Intel UHD. AMD, please consider making your own premium notebook brand to teach your 3rd party manufacturers what your APUs are capable of!
- marmaduke 8y agoThe Dell models we have access to can be configured with Ryzen 7 Pro with Vega GPU and a 4K panel. Is that midrange?
- bitL 8y agoOK, thanks, first time I've heard about something like that! Will check it out (preparing money now)... Do you know the exact models?
- marmaduke 8y agoThe one I see is a 14" Latitude 5495, configurable with a Ryzen 7 Pro 2700U. I was wrong about the 4k screen, it's 1920x1080.
- bitL 8y agoAlright, a glimmer of hope for a decent Ryzen notebook has just died :-/
- marmaduke 8y agoWhat’s decent? I do HPC, data science and dev work, and that laptop is more than enough.
- bitL 8y agoSpecifically retina-style display. I have a perfect vision, can't go back to 1080p and use all-retina/HiDPI screens exclusively for 5 years already. Even got the very latest LG 5k2k ultrawide display yesterday.
- berbec 8y agoEven without actual Ryzen chips in laptops, we get the benifits. The Thinkpads and XPS series having Intel, low-power, quad cores is a direct result of the desktop chips going to six and eight core.
- Findeton 8y agoIs there a 6-core mobile (low power) Ryzen CPU for laptops? I don't think there is, which is a pity.
- mamon 8y agoI think it's impossible, because the whole concept of Zen architecture is to produce 4-core dies, and then glue them together to create a gigantic 8-core or 16-core processor. There isn't 6-core (or 8-core) Ryzen mobile processor, because it wouldn't physically fit inside the laptop. But Rome architecture, unveiled yesterday uses 8-core dies, so there's hope.
- Symmetry 8y agoI was looking into getting an A485 Thinkpad which has a Ryzen in it. Sadly, from reviews it sounded like AMD's platform isn't as good at getting into really low power states as Intel is and that shows up in battery life.
- unethical_ban 8y agoYo! I just bought an E485 from Lenovo, and it's definitely not "low". 4C/8T 2.5 GHz, Vega 10 graphics, 16GB RAM, 128GB SSD and 1080p 14" matte display. The A485 is better spec'ed with docking capability, ports, and an external battery. Linux works on it with some tweaks, and in 4.20 full support is added. Granted, it's harder to find, but I am hopeful that with Ryzen performing well, and their Vega GPU beating the crap out of Intel integrated and competing with Nvidia MX150, that we'll see more respect from laptop makers. tl;dr Buy a thinkpad.
- asfgionio1234 8y agoI wouldn't say AMD is closing the gap in CPUs. They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead. For whatever reason, Nvidia hasn't stagnated the way Intel has. Nvidia has continued rapid progress in GPUs even though they have a dominant position (and a near monopoly in the datacenter). Perhaps because they don't have as much of a lead as Intel used to? Intel was a monopoly, plain and simple, but AMD has always been a contender when it comes to GPUs.
- neogodless 8y agoThe market made it pretty clear that as long as Nvidia was increasing performance substantially with each release, they could collect a healthy margin of profit. There was no incentive to artificially slow down their progress. (Additionally, the benefits of GPU power were clear to gamers, and new benefits from parallel processing units became apparent in the areas of cryptocurrency and machine learning.) Intel, however, ran into engineering issues with their process improvement, while having limited market-driven incentive to spend and innovate improvements to their efficiency (IPC) beyond a certain level (or to increase core count.) So their "tick-tock" cycle was broken.
- lozaning 8y agoNvidia came to my place of work to do a presentation on the stuff they were working on around AI and Deep learning. More than anything, I took away the message that regardless of how large your budget is, they've got a way for you to spend all it on GPU compute.
- gwbas1c 8y ago> They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead. For awhile in the early 2000's, AMD's CPUs were supposedly better than Intel's CPUs. There was a lot of doom and gloom predicted. I briefly worked for Intel during this period. At an internal quarterly meeting, they shared some confidential information. It was very simple, and very damning to AMD. (In short, Intel very quickly came back on top for reasons that were very obvious to anyone paying attention.) I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Intel right now. I wonder if they really are falling behind, or if they know some things that we don't?
- bitL 8y agoYeah, despite owning 2080Ti and some Teslas, I'd strongly prefer AMD to be competitive in Deep Learning space. I've heard that recently tensorflow-rocm can be installed using simple: `pip install tensorflow-rocm` Anyone did some Vega64/56/RX580 benchmarks with this? How fast is it in comparison to 1080Ti/2080Ti/Titan V? Can it do latest state-of-art models? Thanks!
- fierarul 8y agoIt would be great to do Deep Learning with AMD GPUs. Might do wonders for prices too as new nVidia are really expensive nowadays. Of course, crypto might have something to do with this. I see miners offloading GTX 1060-s and 1070-s so perhaps the second hand market might become more approachable?
- twtw 8y agoLambda labs has done some benchmarks. > MIOpen[1] is a step in this direction but still causes the VEGA 64 + MIOpen to be 60% of the performance of a 1080 Ti + CuDNN based on benchmarks we've conducted internally at Lambda. Let that soak in for a second: the VEGA 64 (15TFLOPS theoretical peak) is 0.6x of a 1080 Ti (11.3TFLOPS theoretical peak). MIOpen is very far behind CuDNN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18197988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18197988
- Symmetry 8y agoThis wouldn't be the first time AMD has ceded the top tier to NVidia but still been pretty competitive in the mid range and down. This was what they were doing in the HD 4000 series era.
- ip26 8y agoI would think it's tough to recapture significant marketshare & performance parity in two markets at the same time. Hopefully as revenue in CPU's increases, some of that can then be invested in R&D on GPU's.
- soulnothing 8y agoThe other portion here. Is the disagreement with Radeon Technology groups and AMD. https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/raja-koduri-joins-intel/ https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/raja-koduri-joins-i... I can't find the other news articles. But a number of Radeon group employees have moved to Intel. A lot of the tension I read was that the Vega team was ransacked. For console engagement chips i.e. Playstation 5 and the new Xbox. There was also speculation of disagreement between Raja and Lisa. I'm also waiting for a higher end AMD gpu, but will probably grab a 5xx series in the future to tide me over.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoThe mi60 is not in the same class as the 2080ti. It's a 331 mm2 chip competing against a 775 mm2 one.
- dracodoc 8y agoAMD's resources is limited and they selected a proper priority 1. CPU first, GPU next. as a break through in CPU side is easier than GPU side - just go with more cores with chiplet, since intel basically stopped innovation, while GPU side will be much tougher. 2. data center first, consumer/gamer second. Vega is not meant to compete with best Nvidia card, but it was designed to handle both data center/ML needs and gaming need, maybe the gaming version is just a space holder. The data center version will bring more profit and buy time for AMD to develop the software ecosystem -- CUDA is the moat of Nvidia, and AMD need time to overcome that. So 7nm is used on data center version instead of a gaming card, which make perfectly sense for AMD.
- shmerl 8y ago> Is it too much to ask of AMD to handle both? They are working on new GPU architecture to address it. It's something post Navi supposedly.
- ksec 8y agoThe basic principle of GPU, performance scales linearly with transistor count and die size. Since GPU is nothing more than a massively parallel beast, the more you throw in the better. You can't really expect a 400mm2 GPU to compete with 800mm2 square GPU. So unless AMD made a monster size GPU they will never be able to compete directly with Nvidia. So why doesn't AMD make one? Economies of scale. Nvidia could afford the huge price of design, testing and (relatively) low yield of an 800mm2 chip, as long as they have customers buying bulk of it. Nvidia is basically enjoying all the Deep Learning / Machine Learning Money buying to their CUDA ecosystem, they could afford to make such bet and they are selling it as fast as they could make them. AMD doesn't have this luxury, and Lisa Su knew that well, that is why they could only compete in segment that makes sense. Until the day ROCm can compete directly with CUDA, and its demand are high enough before AMD could afford doing a monster die size chip. But AMD already has plan to use the same Chiplet strategy for GPU, and hopefully everything learned with EPYC will fully be used for these GPU.