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CPU sales, sure. The value per core is through the roof. Nvidia is just too entrenched with gamers and CUDA users for Navi to have a chance. It would take a sil

CPU sales, sure. The value per core is through the roof. Nvidia is just too entrenched with gamers and CUDA users for Navi to have a chance. It would take a silicon miracle for Navi to be good enough to convert team green fanboys. This piece is fluff.

onli 7y ago
> Nvidia is just too entrenched with gamers No reason to think that. Ryzen showed that despite years of neglecting gamers (FX really was horrible for games) they come back as soon as the offer is better. Maybe less in the first generation, but in the second of just having the better offer they do (with the Ryzen 2000 series). AMD is already still popular in the RX 570/580 segment, if Navi were competitive AMD would be fine there. CUDA might be a different story, that depends on the software and if tensorflow etc is even still relevant then.
- plopz 7y ago
  Ryzen is still worse for games though, it just doesn't have the single-threaded performance.
  - jagger27 7y ago
    We're talking single percentage point differences at this point versus the very best Intel silicon.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - onli 7y ago
    I'm collecting benchmarks and creating a global one in https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/cpu https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/cpu. The best Intel cpus are faster because they have a higher clock. Where the clock is equal Ryzen is minimally slower, and they are cheaper then while having more threads. Regardless, the Ryzen processors reach very good FPS in current games, look at the FPS of the Ryzen 5 2600 for example (https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%5B%5D=AMD+Ryzen+5+2600 https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...).
    - lazyjones 7y ago
      Are these run with all the available Spectre/Meltdown fixes or without?
      - onli 7y ago
        That depends on each individual benchmark (hover over/click on the bar to go to the source). I'd say: Most of the time the patches are applied.
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      That's quite an useful and very clean page. Thank you :)
    - plopz 7y ago
      Looks to me like the i5s have lower clock, lower tdp same price but perform better than the ryzens.
      - onli 7y ago
        Well, that's kind of true. 2600X vs i5-8400 is the goto comparison for that, since they both are at 4 GHz (4.1 vs 4.0), see https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%5B%5D=Intel+Core+i5-8400&ids%5B%5D=AMD+Ryzen+5+2600X https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%... for that. Yes, the i5-8400 is a bit faster while having a lower tdp and being at the same price, depending on the game of course. But the 2600X is unlocked and comes with a better cooler. And the Ryzen 5 2600 is cheaper than both while also being unlocked, and the cooler is still better than that of the i5. The 2600 especially is really attractive, even more so if you factor in that AM4 is the better supported platform (it will run on the board you bought for the Ryzen 3 1200 when that series was released, and it is supposed to run the Ryzen 3000 series). There now is the i5-9400F which is again a little bit faster than the i5-8400 while being cheaper. If that one had a cheaper board than the Z390 chipsets supporting it out of the box it would be a real reason for AMD to lower the price of the Ryzen 5 2600(X).
- lagadu 7y ago
  "Popular" is a very strong word for the 580 and Polaris in general; according to the steam hardware survey[0], the 1060 has a bit over 15% of the users while the 580, 480, 570 and 470 don't even reach 3% combined. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
  - onli 7y ago
    Good point. Maybe what I'm seeing is already included in the jump from 0.68% to 1.20%. Dunno, I really get the impression that the RX 580 is a more popular option than the 1060 in the communities I look at, though many there now pick more expensive RTX cards. Obviously I don't see the whole picture.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      I just got 6 RX-580's for about $125 apiece. Great card and great prices.
sharpneli 7y ago
Not just silicon miracle. Especially a driver miracle. Right now AMD is kinda usable-ish on DX and so and so in OpenCL if one spends a lot of time optimizing specifically for them. Their OpenGL support is atrocious. Their Vulkan implementation is full of bugs. AMD has had issues with drivers for ages. And there is no improvement in sight.
- avinium 7y ago
  I get the feeling that OpenCL is going to become a second-class citizen in favour of ROCm (https://rocm.github.io/ https://rocm.github.io/), which looks very promising for HPC/deep learning on AMD GPUs. I haven't got stuck into it yet, but when I was doing some research it seemed like the AMD team had invested a lot of effort in minimizing the work needed to either support/port CUDA-specific code. I'm optimistic about AMD fighting their way back into contention as far as deep learning goes. I don't know what that means in the gaming world, but I assume a win in the former will help them in the latter.
  - antt 7y ago
    Do you have an link that goes over what ROCm does and why I should care about it? I'm interested in getting a purely amd setup this year.
    - avinium 7y ago
      Here's a link that's a couple of years old now, but gives a pretty reasonable overview of where it sits in the stack: https://gpuopen.com/ported-caffe-hip-heres-happened/ https://gpuopen.com/ported-caffe-hip-heres-happened/ As to why you should care, it depends at what level you work. I'm not a graphics/HPC programmer, so I can't really comment on what you'd be using it for in those areas. For DL applications, though, CUDA/CUDNN used to be the only GPU libraries that offered some of the common/optimized operations you'd encounter in deep learning (e.g. 2d convolutions). That meant you were limited to NVIDIA GPUs within all the higher level frameworks (Tensorflow/Pytorch/etc). With ROCm more developed, it can supplant CUDA as the low-level library for those frameworks. This means you can start using AMD GPUs for training/inference, which are considerably cheaper. In fact, in the few months that have passed since I last checked, it now appears that ROCm supports TF - big step. it means you're no longer locked to NVIDIA GPUs
nabla9 7y ago
With CUDA users silicon is secondary. Nvidia has huge edge on the software side that is not going away soon. Even if AMD matches the raw performance, the actual performance and development tooling that allows it is what makes the difference. AMD just don't seem to push the software side hard enough.
anfilt 7y ago
Really we should be trying to move from the proprietary lock in that is CUDA.
endorphone 7y ago
CUDA is fairly entrenched, but there is extraordinary little "loyalty" or stickiness among gamers (nor should there be). Right now nvidia reigns supreme because they have the best peak performance and value proposition. If AMD presents an option that upends this the ratios would change dramatically. Just as we saw when ATI/AMD share halved over just two years when their designs were no longer competitive.
- jagger27 7y ago
  The reason I argue this is in part because of what happened with Nvidia's GeForce 400 series (Fermi). That generation was an absolute dog (heat, power, driver issues, you name it) versus AMD's absolutely fantastic Radeon 5000 architecture. Despite the faults in Nvidia's cards, they still outsold AMD something like 10:1. Jim from AdordedTV goes into great depth on this strange era of GPU competition and dives deep into the press at the time and retrospective statistics. "Competitive" is more than just raw performance, it seems.
  - lagadu 7y ago
    What you're describing is called market stability. The more stable a market is, the harder the momentum a brand has shifts towards competitors. It doesn't just take a single inferior generation of products to tank a brand/company and swing the whole market around, you need multiple sequential generations like that for that to happen.
carnagii 7y ago
With next-gen xbox, playstation, and Google Stadia all running on AMD they will continue to ship plenty of units on the GPU front. Small market share on discrete GPUs translates to better growth potential, which is the whole point of the article. AMD is already shipping 7nm GPUs, they are just too expensive to be competitive. As 7nm continues to mature there is significant potential for AMD to grow sales if they are releasing a 2nd gen 7nm product at the same time as Nvidia is releasing 1st gen. Small market share means greater growth potential. AMD is also in a better position than ever before because of having CPU, GPU, and next-gen custom SOCs consolidated on a single process, which means they are a much higher volume customer for TSMC than ever before, which means priority treatment, and they are manufacturing the broadest range of designs on that node, which means their internal knowledge of it is the best. 3Q is the earliest that they will see any revenue from these products, which is why the are forecasting 2Q decline. 3Q will likely be partial ramp, but 4Q should see a big pop.
wlesieutre 7y ago
I have a GTX 970 and would love to replace it with an AMD card. But that has more to do with Apple's anti-Nvidia vendetta and me wanting to consolidate my gaming computer into an eGPU than any particular preference in GPU manufacturers.

onli 7y ago

> Nvidia is just too entrenched with gamers No reason to think that. Ryzen showed that despite years of neglecting gamers (FX really was horrible for games) they come back as soon as the offer is better. Maybe less in the first generation, but in the second of just having the better offer they do (with the Ryzen 2000 series). AMD is already still popular in the RX 570/580 segment, if Navi were competitive AMD would be fine there. CUDA might be a different story, that depends on the software and if tensorflow etc is even still relevant then.

plopz 7y ago
Ryzen is still worse for games though, it just doesn't have the single-threaded performance.
- jagger27 7y ago
  We're talking single percentage point differences at this point versus the very best Intel silicon.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- onli 7y ago
  I'm collecting benchmarks and creating a global one in https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/cpu https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/cpu. The best Intel cpus are faster because they have a higher clock. Where the clock is equal Ryzen is minimally slower, and they are cheaper then while having more threads. Regardless, the Ryzen processors reach very good FPS in current games, look at the FPS of the Ryzen 5 2600 for example (https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%5B%5D=AMD+Ryzen+5+2600 https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...).
  - lazyjones 7y ago
    Are these run with all the available Spectre/Meltdown fixes or without?
    - onli 7y ago
      That depends on each individual benchmark (hover over/click on the bar to go to the source). I'd say: Most of the time the patches are applied.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    That's quite an useful and very clean page. Thank you :)
  - plopz 7y ago
    Looks to me like the i5s have lower clock, lower tdp same price but perform better than the ryzens.
    - onli 7y ago
      Well, that's kind of true. 2600X vs i5-8400 is the goto comparison for that, since they both are at 4 GHz (4.1 vs 4.0), see https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%5B%5D=Intel+Core+i5-8400&ids%5B%5D=AMD+Ryzen+5+2600X https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%... for that. Yes, the i5-8400 is a bit faster while having a lower tdp and being at the same price, depending on the game of course. But the 2600X is unlocked and comes with a better cooler. And the Ryzen 5 2600 is cheaper than both while also being unlocked, and the cooler is still better than that of the i5. The 2600 especially is really attractive, even more so if you factor in that AM4 is the better supported platform (it will run on the board you bought for the Ryzen 3 1200 when that series was released, and it is supposed to run the Ryzen 3000 series). There now is the i5-9400F which is again a little bit faster than the i5-8400 while being cheaper. If that one had a cheaper board than the Z390 chipsets supporting it out of the box it would be a real reason for AMD to lower the price of the Ryzen 5 2600(X).
lagadu 7y ago
"Popular" is a very strong word for the 580 and Polaris in general; according to the steam hardware survey[0], the 1060 has a bit over 15% of the users while the 580, 480, 570 and 470 don't even reach 3% combined. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
- onli 7y ago
  Good point. Maybe what I'm seeing is already included in the jump from 0.68% to 1.20%. Dunno, I really get the impression that the RX 580 is a more popular option than the 1060 in the communities I look at, though many there now pick more expensive RTX cards. Obviously I don't see the whole picture.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    I just got 6 RX-580's for about $125 apiece. Great card and great prices.

sharpneli 7y ago

Not just silicon miracle. Especially a driver miracle. Right now AMD is kinda usable-ish on DX and so and so in OpenCL if one spends a lot of time optimizing specifically for them. Their OpenGL support is atrocious. Their Vulkan implementation is full of bugs. AMD has had issues with drivers for ages. And there is no improvement in sight.

avinium 7y ago
I get the feeling that OpenCL is going to become a second-class citizen in favour of ROCm (https://rocm.github.io/ https://rocm.github.io/), which looks very promising for HPC/deep learning on AMD GPUs. I haven't got stuck into it yet, but when I was doing some research it seemed like the AMD team had invested a lot of effort in minimizing the work needed to either support/port CUDA-specific code. I'm optimistic about AMD fighting their way back into contention as far as deep learning goes. I don't know what that means in the gaming world, but I assume a win in the former will help them in the latter.
- antt 7y ago
  Do you have an link that goes over what ROCm does and why I should care about it? I'm interested in getting a purely amd setup this year.
  - avinium 7y ago
    Here's a link that's a couple of years old now, but gives a pretty reasonable overview of where it sits in the stack: https://gpuopen.com/ported-caffe-hip-heres-happened/ https://gpuopen.com/ported-caffe-hip-heres-happened/ As to why you should care, it depends at what level you work. I'm not a graphics/HPC programmer, so I can't really comment on what you'd be using it for in those areas. For DL applications, though, CUDA/CUDNN used to be the only GPU libraries that offered some of the common/optimized operations you'd encounter in deep learning (e.g. 2d convolutions). That meant you were limited to NVIDIA GPUs within all the higher level frameworks (Tensorflow/Pytorch/etc). With ROCm more developed, it can supplant CUDA as the low-level library for those frameworks. This means you can start using AMD GPUs for training/inference, which are considerably cheaper. In fact, in the few months that have passed since I last checked, it now appears that ROCm supports TF - big step. it means you're no longer locked to NVIDIA GPUs

nabla9 7y ago

With CUDA users silicon is secondary. Nvidia has huge edge on the software side that is not going away soon. Even if AMD matches the raw performance, the actual performance and development tooling that allows it is what makes the difference. AMD just don't seem to push the software side hard enough.

anfilt 7y ago

Really we should be trying to move from the proprietary lock in that is CUDA.

endorphone 7y ago

CUDA is fairly entrenched, but there is extraordinary little "loyalty" or stickiness among gamers (nor should there be). Right now nvidia reigns supreme because they have the best peak performance and value proposition. If AMD presents an option that upends this the ratios would change dramatically. Just as we saw when ATI/AMD share halved over just two years when their designs were no longer competitive.

jagger27 7y ago
The reason I argue this is in part because of what happened with Nvidia's GeForce 400 series (Fermi). That generation was an absolute dog (heat, power, driver issues, you name it) versus AMD's absolutely fantastic Radeon 5000 architecture. Despite the faults in Nvidia's cards, they still outsold AMD something like 10:1. Jim from AdordedTV goes into great depth on this strange era of GPU competition and dives deep into the press at the time and retrospective statistics. "Competitive" is more than just raw performance, it seems.
- lagadu 7y ago
  What you're describing is called market stability. The more stable a market is, the harder the momentum a brand has shifts towards competitors. It doesn't just take a single inferior generation of products to tank a brand/company and swing the whole market around, you need multiple sequential generations like that for that to happen.

carnagii 7y ago

With next-gen xbox, playstation, and Google Stadia all running on AMD they will continue to ship plenty of units on the GPU front. Small market share on discrete GPUs translates to better growth potential, which is the whole point of the article. AMD is already shipping 7nm GPUs, they are just too expensive to be competitive. As 7nm continues to mature there is significant potential for AMD to grow sales if they are releasing a 2nd gen 7nm product at the same time as Nvidia is releasing 1st gen. Small market share means greater growth potential. AMD is also in a better position than ever before because of having CPU, GPU, and next-gen custom SOCs consolidated on a single process, which means they are a much higher volume customer for TSMC than ever before, which means priority treatment, and they are manufacturing the broadest range of designs on that node, which means their internal knowledge of it is the best. 3Q is the earliest that they will see any revenue from these products, which is why the are forecasting 2Q decline. 3Q will likely be partial ramp, but 4Q should see a big pop.

wlesieutre 7y ago

I have a GTX 970 and would love to replace it with an AMD card. But that has more to do with Apple's anti-Nvidia vendetta and me wanting to consolidate my gaming computer into an eGPU than any particular preference in GPU manufacturers.