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AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card
- dragontamer 8y agoIts an interesting design for sure. 4x Stacks of HBM2 means 1TBps memory bandwidth at 16GB. Only 60-compute units enabled (maybe 4-CUs are expected to break during manufacturing? Its a weird number for sure...). Since it shares dies with the MI50, the Radeon VII will have 1/2 speed double-precision, making this the cheapest high-performance double-precision card in existance. ------ FP16 compute is supported at double speed, but there are no tensor cores. So FP16 matrix multiplication / tensor ops are still a major benefit to NVidia. But the memory size and bandwidth is quite salivating. That's a lot of bandwidth, and a number of problems are known to be memory-bound. Deep learning enthusiasts probably will stick to NVidia cards, but other compute problems may want to start playing around with this thing. ------ Video gamers seem meh about the specs. But I think anyone looking at this card for its compute performance would be impressed.
- jra101 8y agoPerfect dies (64 CUs) get sold as a Radeon Instinct MI60 at a much higher price.
- dragontamer 8y agoGood point, and that makes a lot of sense.
- jamesblonde 8y agoDo you have any estimate what that higher price will be?
- dragontamer 8y agoI'm pretty sure MI60 is north of $5000. Maybe $8000 or so.
- doctorpangloss 8y ago> Deep learning enthusiasts probably will stick to NVIDIA cards We've been building the wrong hardware for ML for a while now. A TPU doesn't delivery supremacy for problems over GPU hardware. It's a Google senior engineering retention and PR project. Exceedingly few problems resemble image recognition. You wouldn't be able to tell from the research, because due to the tools it's sort of the only affordable thing to do. Playing Go barely looks like it. Or more accurately, Go doesn't look like most other games. Molecular physics and synthesis barely looks like it. Neural programs/neural Turing machines that matter (converting complex sim code like game rules and physics into neural networks via learning) may never achieve the accuracy or performance/watt necessary to really compete with just making a bunch of CPUs or straight up dedicated hardware. Word embeddings are a disaster. People keep trying to do innovative stuff with it, and it's 2018 and we've just just recently got entity names from Wikipedia. I think Peter Norvig, having basically only machine translation to point to, is really going to eat crow when non-perceptual AI tasks sort of have nothing to do with stuff Google has developed. But what do I know. I'm sure someone's going to trot out some obscure TPU or GPU-driven thing. It's been years! Awesome innovations in hardware really do lead to obvious, immediate crazy cool stuff. I'm really talking about the Kinect as an example here, in that it was really hyped and not much came of it. The TPU, and ML-specified hardware targeted to today's problems, is a slower-motion Kinect of our time. Mining cryptocurrency, the most recent innovation, is the opposite of cool. I'm confident these tools exist to capitalize on the subsidy from the gaming industry. AMD is wise to not chase ML features.
- nradov 8y agoWhat is the right hardware for ML?
- doctorpangloss 8y agoProbably Larabee. Too early and too expensive for its time.
- dragontamer 8y agoThe Japanese PEZY machine looks incredibly interresting. Too bad it is only used in that one super-computer. Its overall design sits somewhere between a GPU and CPU. Like a GPU, it supports 8-way hyperthreading (GPUs typically support 10. CPUs usually only support 2... maybe 4 for Larabee). Like a GPU, its programmed through an OpenCL-like language (I know you don't like that, but its how it works). However, the overall layout is very CPU-like as well: a "City" is composed of "Villages", which is composed of multiple "Processing Elements". Each PE is scalar like a normal CPU, although 8-way SMT. So its not like a GPU's SIMD or SIMT architecture in this regards. -------- See information here: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/pezy/pezy-scx/pezy-sc https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/pezy/pezy-scx/pezy-sc It really is an interesting design that toes the line between CPU and GPU.
- nsxwolf 8y agoIf it could somehow actually sell for the MSRP (which of course it won't), it is a better gaming card than the RTX 2080. The 2080 costs more, and it's flagship feature is something you'll almost certainly want to turn off for gaming since it kills your frame rate and doesn't provide anything most people will notice while playing a game. Screen space reflections and cubemaps are convincing enough when you're zipping around a game world.
- vatueil 8y ago$699 matches the MSRP for the RTX 2080: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=427&sort=price https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=427&sort=pri...
- nsxwolf 8y agoBut you aren't usually going to be finding them that cheap. That will probably be the case with the VII too, but we don't know yet.
- vatueil 8y agoWell, that's why I linked to PCPartPicker, to show that RTX 2080 models at MSRP do exist. They may have been scarce at launch, but they can be purchased today less than 4 months later. Since AMD will sell the Radeon VII directly at first, I think early adopters will probably face limited quantities rather than price markups (not counting unauthorized resellers). After that, we'll have to see how the situation with retailers and later on non-reference models shakes out.
- opencl 8y agoThere's no guarantee this won't have gimped FP64, Hawaii for example had 1/2 rate FP64 but the consumer cards were 1/8 speed. But even 1/8 would leave the 1/32 NVIDIA cards in the dust. If they don't gimp FP64 it won't leave a whole lot of reason to buy the MI50 for probably 10x the price.
- dragontamer 8y ago> If they don't gimp FP64 it won't leave a whole lot of reason to buy the MI50 for probably 10x the price. MI50 has ECC RAM support. That's absolutely necessary for high-end scientific compute.
- keldaris 8y agoNot at a 10x price difference it isn't, at least if you're at all price conscious and looking for workstations / small clusters. This makes it far cheaper to just re-run simulations as necessary to get the same statistical guarantees with regards to memory corruption errors.
- hajile 8y agoWhat AMD needs right now is marketshare so more stuff gets written in something cross-platform instead of cuda. I'd imagine that 1/2 has at least been discussed at great length for this card.
- twtw 8y agoIt's looking like that "something cross-platform" will be cuda, given that AMD's latest approach is to implement a compiler to convert cuda to "hip."
- tutanchamun 8y ago> There's no guarantee this won't have gimped FP64 [..] It's not gimped according to Ryan Smith from AnandTech: https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1083959608371175424 https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1083959608371175424 Which means it destroys it's only real competitor for consumer FP64 - the Titan V - which costs 3000 Dollar.
- shmerl 8y agoWould it make sense for them to make a 8GB variant as well? 16GB make it very expensive and actually for gaming it's most likely not needed yet.
- giobox 8y agoIt looks like one of the card’s headline features, 1TB/sec of memory bandwidth, was only achievable with a 16gb design (basically a doubling of channels/memory over the previous Vega 64 design, with which this card shares many similarities).
- shmerl 8y agoWhy can't they use 4x2GB and provide the same bandwidth? Or it's some limitation of HBM2?
- Geforce8472 8y agoHBM2 has minimum 4GB in each stack IIRC
- pas 8y agoyes, apparently. though thry could probably get it done eventually, probably not worth it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18868617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18868617
- jyrkesh 8y ago> They are presumably not going to be able to match NVIDIA’s energy efficiency, and they won’t have feature parity since AMD doesn’t (yet) have its own DirectX Raytracing (DXR) implementation. I assume this means that it won't support raytracing at all? Or will it, but with some non-DXR implementation?
- pitaj 8y agoThey might support it with a software upgrade in the future, but I doubt it.
- dragontamer 8y agoNVidia's raytracing is hardware accelerated. There's specific cores that can ONLY traverse a BVH tree built into the NVidia hardware. Furthermore, NVidia's raytracing features leverage FP16 matrix multiplication for denoising. The Radeon VII will certainly be slower at raytracing (if AMD ever decides to support the feature). It has FP16 support and huge RAM bandwidth (which will help traverse a BVH Tree), but I would expect it to be many times slower than dedicated hardware units. Without tensor cores (VII only supports hardware-accelerated FP16 Dot-products), there's no way it'd keep up with Nvidia on denoising or BVH traversals.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoBased on the pixel sparkling in the video I've seen if Battlefield, it looks like Nvidia's raytracing is being used for each pixel. I'm not sure if it has to be that way or if it's just underoptomozed at the moment. I think you could get something 95% as good with far better performance by only tracing vertices and then raster rendering the resultant transform. Would be a good approach for accurate shadows too where you don't really care about texture fragments.
- dragontamer 8y ago> Based on the pixel sparkling in the video I've seen if Battlefield, it looks like Nvidia's raytracing is being used for each pixel. I'm not sure if it has to be that way or if it's just underoptomozed at the moment. 1-sample per pixel is already incredibly low for raytracing. A raw 1 spp raytraced image looks HORRIBLE. The reason why it looks anywhere close to usable is because NVidia post-processes all of that noise through their tensor-cores FP16. It is some kind of spacial / temporal-filter effect (averaging pixels across time, and space... where "space" is mapped to geometry framebuffers to keep object boundaries correct).
- DCKing 8y agoIn July 2015 AMD released a 28nm chip with more GCN compute units than this card at a lower price - the Radeon R9 Fury X had the full 64 CUs / 4096 shaders enabled for $649. And it was considered a bit of a dud as a product. This Radeon VII is 2.5 process nodes better, but launches with 60 CUs / 3840 shaders enabled. All still on essentially the GCN architecture. And it launches at $699, more than three and a half years after the former. Yet due to sheer clock speed increases and HBM improvements (16GB, 1 TB/s, wow) they actually seem surpisingly competitive. I'm both incredibly impressed and incredibly underwhelmed.
- dogma1138 8y agoDepends on how you define competitive, in gaming which this card at least partially is aimed at its about as fast as a 1080ti a card launched 2 years ago for $700.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoI'm hoping a 8gb or 12 gb version comes out for $500 or so. 16gb seems like overkill for the next couple years of game releases.
- dogma1138 8y agoThey can’t do 8 GB there are no 2GB HBM2 modules apparently and they can’t cut the amount of modules without cutting the CUs in half. It’s essentially just to keep up some production volume this is their HPC die sold to the consumer market its the Titan V equivalent die of AMD minus the Tensor Cores just for much much cheaper. It’s likely going to be a flop gaming wise, 2x8 pin power connectors put it at 300W TDP with performance only matching that of a 1089ti/2080 in the best case scenarios AMD currently has. The 1080ti can be had for under $600 if you can find it the 2080 is around $700 but you get RTX and DLSS which while isn’t that useful yet is going to be more useful for gaming than 16GB of memory.
- AlphaSite 8y ago
- jMyles 8y agoPerhaps a good candidate for mining coins like LivePeer (one of 8-10 actual solid blockchain projects IMO).
- hughes 8y agoProof-of-work coin mining is a scourge on the environment and the PC component market.
- kinghajj 8y agoBut IIRC still more secure than proof-of-stake systems.
- jMyles 8y agoTranscoding videos is a scourge?! I mean, maybe you think their choice to deploy as an ERC20 was a bad choice; fine. But they're not adding any additional computation to the environment. I don't understand how it's possible to think that LivePeer is bad for the environment without thinking the same thing about, for example, Elastic Transcoder. Your comment reads like a non-sequitur to me.
- wmf 8y agoPresumably hughes is just making a knee-jerk comment about how 99% of PoW systems are doing useless work. Personally I am very skeptical of any system that tries to do proof of useful work like transcoding; it seems vulnerable to cheating.
- m0zg 8y agoIt'd be super-nice if AMD also produced, at a minimum, fully supported versions of PyTorch and TensorFlow for these. NVIDIA would crap its pants if perf is comparable (and possibly drop the prices some).
- greatpatton 8y agoIt is just right here: * https://rocm-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deep_learning/Deep-learning.html https://rocm-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deep_lea... * https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow-upstream https://github.com/ROCmSoftwarePlatform/tensorflow-upstream
- m0zg 8y agoDo they post official benchmarks anywhere? I can only find third party benchmarks of dubious veracity.
- vkaku 8y agoGood hardware. Wrong time to sell at this price point.
- igravious 8y agoIf it weren't for the alternatives of AMD† and Linux God only knows for how long the average Joe would be trapped inside the nVidWintel Borg unit. † and ARM one day: I'm talking desktop/laptop/server here…