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The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the
by torginus 6mo ago
The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange.
If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that this is the technology of the gods, unaffordable by mere mortals?
- cco 6mo agoThat card only had 16GB of memory; its memory bandwidth was 1TB/s.
- imtringued 6mo agoYou're saying this in a world where AMD's highest end consumer GPU in 2026 is also limited to 16 GB.
- thehamkercat 6mo agoRX7900 XTX has 24GB
- fl4regun 6mo agothis card is 4 years old, it's not on store shelves anymore.
- badsectoracula 6mo agoFWIW that depends on the stores you're looking at. There are three models from different manufacturers available here in a few shops. The prices are a bit ouchier than what i paid for mine around Christmas 2024 though (i got mine on a sale).
- throwawayffffas 6mo agoYou can still get "new" ones on amazon in europe.
- throwawayffffas 6mo ago7900XT has 20GB and you can still get some unused ones. R9700 has 32GB and is cheaper than most NVidia consumer GPUs, even though it's a "pro".
- tpm 6mo agoAnd I can still buy a new W7800 48GB for a relatively decent price.
- mrbuttons454 6mo agoThe Pro variant had 32GB, I had one in a 2019 Mac Pro
- tpm 6mo ago> 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today 5090 has 1.8 TB/s?
- dietr1ch 6mo agothen it must be the case you can't get one (for a fair price?)
- petersellers 6mo agoDefine "fair price" 5090s are certainly expensive compared to most other GPUs, but not expensive enough to be unobtanium for nearly any professional who could utilize one as part of their job
- wpm 6mo agoHell, some of us utilize them just to play video games!
- adrian_b 6mo ago5090 is an overpriced outlier. A typical consumer GPU, like RTX 5070, has a 3-times lower memory throughput. Even a RTX 5080 has a lower memory throughput than a Radeon VII from 2019, 7 years ago, while being much more expensive. The memory throughput of GPUs per dollar has regressed greatly during the last 5 years, despite the fact that the widths of the GPU memory interfaces have been reduced, in order to decrease the production costs. RTX 5080 has a 256-bit memory interface, while the much cheaper Radeon VII had an 1024-bit memory interface. RTX 5080 has almost 4-times faster memories than Radeon VII, but it has not used this to increase the memory throughput, but only to reduce the production costs, while simultaneously increasing the product price.
- tpm 6mo ago> Even a RTX 5080 has a lower memory throughput than a Radeon VII from 2019, 7 years ago, while being much more expensive. And it's faster for gaming, I guess? Which is what matters for the typical user. Anyway you can buy much faster GPUs now than in 2019. They are also much more expensive, yes.
- platevoltage 6mo agoI was gonna say, I still use an AMD Vega that uses HBM2.
- tverbeure 6mo agoVega was a card with decent perf/$ for the consumer, but from a pure technical point of view (perf/mm2, perf/BW, perf/W) it was a major failure. Both Vega (and Fiji before it) showed that excess memory BW alone is not sufficient to win.
- zozbot234 6mo ago> Both Vega (and Fiji before it) showed that excess memory BW alone is not sufficient to win. That's correct if you're targeting gamers, but local AI inference changes this picture substantially.
- platevoltage 6mo agoOh I never said it was a great card. It does work for what I need it for though.
- mistyvales 6mo agoMy main system still uses a Vega 64 and it plays all the games I'd care about. Undervolts like a champ! Will use it until it dies..
- platevoltage 6mo agoMine is a Vega 56 that thinks it's a Vega 64. It plays Hitman pretty well, and thats really all I need it for.
- HerbManic 6mo agoI have been wondering this recently. It was the convention that if you wanted to keep costs down, try to keep the memory bus size down as low as possible. Still remember the awful Radeon 9200 SE - 64bit data bus that strangled an already slow GPU. Heck, I have a phone with a 16bit memory bus for instance. The high(ish) clock rate only makes up the difference slightly. But with general prices on all components going up, it might not be such a big factor any more. HBM migght make sense for higher end products which can free up space for the lower end that will never use the tech.
- mlvljr 6mo ago[dead]
- fennecbutt 6mo agoEh I feel like the memory bus width thing was more a case of binning memory controllers and the like. Designing a part with a wide bus and putting the traces down on the board is what I would expect to be the easy part these days (surely). But yield, yield comes for us all.
- sidewndr46 6mo agoIt also does 64 bit floating point I think?
- adrian_b 6mo agoAfter NVIDIA essentially removed FP64 from consumer GPUs (their 1:64 performance ratio is worse than what you can obtain by software emulation, so it is useless, except for testing programs intended to run on datacenter GPUs), AMD persisted for a few years, but then they also followed NVIDIA. AMD Hawaii GPUs still had 1:2 FP64:FP32, while the consumer variant of Radeon VII dropped to 1:4. The following AMD consumer GPUs dropped the FP64 performance to levels that are not competitive with CPUs. Nowadays the only consumer GPUs with decent FP64 performance are the Intel Battlemage GPUs, which have a 1:8 performance ratio, which provides very good performance per dollar.
- LNSY 6mo ago[flagged]
- antonvs 6mo agoOnly indirectly. They have most of the money, so if they want something that’s in short supply, the price will rise to the point that it becomes unaffordable to everyone else. Reason number 7,322 why US-style ultracapitalism is self-destructive, anti-social, and dystopian.
- Nesco 6mo agoWhat do you mean exactly by “Epstein People”? I thoroughly hope it’s not the 4chan definition of it
- nmeofthestate 6mo agoA RAM discussion descends into cranks referring to "Epstein People" and you're the one downvoted - website's absolutely cooked.
- rasz 6mo agoAnd the bottleneck at the time was HBM interposers, not actual ram dies.
- parl_match 6mo ago> why do they come up with the idea that this is the technology of the gods, unaffordable by mere mortals? because the gods want it all and are willing to pay top dollar.
- varispeed 6mo agoIsn't this the case of money going from left pocket to the right, since these companies are owned by the same investment funds? I wonder whether this is some kind of a racket.
- unmole 6mo ago> Isn't this the case of money going from left pocket to the right, since these companies are owned by the same investment funds? No.
- high_na_euv 6mo ago"Owned"? You mean they invested
- conception 6mo agoInvestors are owners, yes.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- whatsupdog 6mo agoSupply and demand. The prices are high because of high demand.
- mitjam 6mo agoYes, it's interesting that HBM was invented by a collaboration between AMD and SK Hynix. It seems, HBM is the way to go for GPUs, anyway. The GB202 die that's in the GDDR7 based RTX 5090 and RTX 6000 Pro literally needed to be this big to support the 512bit memory bus. It's probably only getting worse with smaller node sizes. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCwgAGG2sZQ&t=65s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCwgAGG2sZQ&t=65s). BTW: The 1TB/s is matched by RTX4090 and surpassed by the RTX5090 (1,79 TB/s).
- nektro 6mo agothe hardware dump once we're through the bubble is gonna be wild
- tiberious726 6mo agoThe fury X was a beast for a consumer card, sadly limited by having a mere 4gb of (hbm) VRAM, and a non-refillable AIO. But back when games could fit in 4gb, it was incredible. I'd absolutely buy another hbm consumer GPU if it had at least 8gb (and if I got the vibe/hope AMD will actually support for a couple years...)