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AMD's best Big Navi GPU may only be a match for Nvidia Ampere's second tier
- Thread starter erek
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We will find out, also if Nvidia just produced a token product (not being able to supply the demand) to maintain an illusion of supremacy short term (I hope hot). Some hot inside information, any manipulation/reasons for steps Nvidia/AMD are taking would make one hell of an editorial if the facts are straight combined with some logical conclusions or what to look out for. A definite high stakes game being played here.
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I think the real question is why? That market is tiny. Yes, it has its place when it comes to marketing, but AMD has neither the R&D nor the marketing budget that NVIDIA has.
CyberJunk
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There is alot of assumption in this thread. There is a reason the console manufacturers chose AMD over Nvidia for their graphics. the
I was actually considering selling my 2070 super for one of these 2080 ti'sAnd same people will immediately dump their $1200+ cards at less than half price in an instant. I hope many of them have something to tide them over, if so, begs the question "Did you not find much value in that 2080 Ti to just then accept peanuts for it?"
That's been my thought especially since it was "known" there was going to be a 3090 model and it looked like it was going to be pushed as far as they could push the silicon. I have no doubt at all that nVidia knows what the performance of AMD's new cards is going to be and the 3080 wasn't going to be enough to win.
Look at the MSRP of nVidia's new cards if you need more evidence. There is no way in hell that nVidia would have dropped prices from the previous generation unless they knew AMD has the performance to meet or beat nVidia's new lineup.
CyberJunk
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Well Nvidia is on a samsung 8nm process but we know AMD is gonna be rolling their TSMC 7nm process.
I'm not particularly susceptible to marketing which is probably the reason why I've never really cared who had the halo card. I've never been able to afford or at least justify a halo card so they have no interest to me other than reading reviews about them because I like technology.
It's one thing to wax poetic about a halo card if you own one. Ironically, it's almost always people who don't have them who wax poetic as if it justifies something about themselves.
The real money is in the units sold and that's the low to mid-range market. Margins are a lot smaller but the numbers make up for it. Which happens to be how almost every business in the world makes money.
Nvidia placed the full GA104 die or close to it on the 3070, meaning the 3060 will get the cut down version of GA104 -> looking to be the new 970 in other words for GPU's - where the real money will be. I would think the GA104 dies would be easier to make and the real target for Nvidia.
So its basically a money game in the end? Well I figured there was more involved but yes nV is much larger. So I get your point of view.
Gideon
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If AMD can match or even beat the 3080 they will be very happy with that, beating what I think will likely be vaporware 3090 hardly matters. 99% of the market would be 3080 and down stack and thats where you invest in, the harder part for AMD is convincing people they are just a good of choice as Nvidia. Nvidia marketing is far bigger and more powerful then anything AMD has and that hurts the most.
Samsung 8nm is 2 years old and the underlying 10nm tech is 3 years old. What could they have screwed up so badly on such a "mature" process.
I'm less worried about what process a product is fabbed on than what the product itself can do. It seems AMD has had definite issues with TSMC's 7nm process with regards to clock speeds on Ryzen CPUs. I can't say definitively that it's the process node keeping clock speeds down or the architecture itself that can't handle higher clock speeds or a mixture of both but it's definitely an issue. TSMC definitely hit a home run with the 7nm node but that doesn't mean it's perfect nor does it mean it doesn't have issues.
Look at how long Intel was able to stretch 14nm for comparison. Intel is still flogging that poor node for all its worth because there is no other choice.
Just because nVidia is on Samsung 8nm doesn't mean it's inherently inferior. There is no guarantee that the new nVidia cards would be faster or lower power or generate less heat if they had used TSMC 7nm instead of Samsung 8nm. A possibly more advanced process does not automatically mean the product is better. You can look at Intel for 14nm to 10nm for that.
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Well is custom "8N" so I have no idea. I suspect it is a custom 10nm design that they decided to market a 8nm, when it likely is not.
Yeah my understanding is that all Samsung 8nm is 10nm. Just like TSMC 12FFN was 16nm.
There could be inefficiencies or problems with the actual of the chip which may have nothing to do with the underlying process they're fabbed on. I remember back in the socket A days that AMD was releasing different steppings of Athlons at what seemed like a rate of every couple of months. T-bird, Palomino, T-bred-A, T-bred-B and Barton to name some of them. Some of those steppings made incremental changes to the architecture while others were little more than moving the bits and pieces of the die around but in some cases they made great differences in thermals and yields.
My guess is Navi was basically a testbed for the new architecture and 7nm process which had power and thermal problems. I suspect Navi2 is going to be a large refinement to fix the power and efficiency issues of Navi as well as architecture changes for increased performance and new features. nVidia's reveal the other day indicates that AMD definitely fixed the issues with Navi and improved upon it greatly.
CyberJunk
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I don't really agree with that statement. If Nvidia actually believed they had a far superior product as they claim they wouldn't be pricing these cards that supposedly provide in some cases 2x performance over the previous generation so aggressively! Usually you get 15-20% improvement for these prices. When you have a something nobody else has you can demand more money for it. That's not what happened here. You could say it's because the Economy contraction or future consoles but i don't really think so. The future consoles are all using AMD and right now testers are testing the hardware and word got out or leaked that tipped Nvidia off. This is why i believe AMD has something competitive this time around. I remember the 5700xt it was a really good product. It had artifical power limits that limited it's clocks. It was fustrating to overclock. I look forward to seeing a more refined product which i guess is RDNA 2.
Based on my professional military watercooling experience and analysis, Lisa & co. find themselves in a situation where the impossible seems to now be expected of them: Be faster than Nvidia, and/or cheaper than Nvidia (preferably and). Because anything less won't be "disruptive" enough. And even then you'll still have slobs asking "yes but where are my three bundled games?"
As the entrenched leader, Leather Jacket Man has achieved huge mindshare and marketshare advantages that will be a pain in the ass for AMD to overcome. But fortunately Lisa seems to understand the long game, and won't simply throw her arms up and say "low margin, low volume niche segment - why do I even need this aggravation".
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If kopite7Kimi provided the correct die size, then Samsung 8nm has similar transistor density to TSMC 7nm in Navi 10 and XBSX.
I think they are worried about consoles.
MrGuvernment
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I guess, does AMD need to have a high end killer? It is where they get the least sales from.....Did they not say years ago they wont bother making "high end" GPu's any more?
They do? Razen 3 will bost to 4.6+ on water that not really what I would call clock speed problems... Intel clocks so high as they have been on the same node for how many years now?
Also if amd can come in at 3080 level with Hdmi 2.1 and hopefully be less gimped then puting 10gb vram on to and be a bit cheaper also I think a lot of gamers would be happy myself included
AMD could still make a 24gb / 32gb hbm card like the Vega VII & get people to buy it despite poor gaming performance compared to the 3090
DukenukemX
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Did something happen today with AMD? I've been gone all day.
I'm not the only person who thinks this. Ask Linus from Linus Tech Tips.
Considering what's been going on lately with Microsoft long ago putting their "Xbox Exclusives" onto PC and now Sony seems to be doing the same thing. The fact is that PC gaming is not a small niche market of gaming but now the dominate gaming platform. Doesn't it seem odd that the PS5 and Xbox Series X looks like a gaming PC if you just looked at the specs? It's my firm belief that the reason Sony and Microsoft haven't released any prices is because they aren't afraid of each other as much as they're afraid of Nvidia. Nvidia did it with the GTX 970 when they released a $330 graphics card that performed like their $700 GTX 780 Ti. Now we have the RTX 3070 that performs faster than a RTX 2080 Ti and the RTX 3060 will probably cost $350 and perform nearly as fast as a RTX 2080 Ti. I predicted that Nvidia would do this and sure enough they did. Do you really doubt that Nvidia is indirectly fighting consoles with these new RTX 3000's cards?
The pendulum swings both ways. On one had yes console gaming has effected PC gaming because console gaming is the lowest common denominator. On the other hand PC gaming has force console games to run at 30 FPS at not even 1080p.
I get it. But consoles aren’t going anywhere. There will always be large market for it.
Mylex
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Are you looking at real numbers or feelings? Mobile gaming is the number 1 market share followed by consoles then PC. Just a quick googling shows a few articles reflecting that. One had numbers showing a 10 Billion dollar lead the consoles had over PC's. While PC gaming is far from Niche it doesn't dominate.
Video Game Industry Hits Reset in 2020
The World’s 2.7 Billion Gamers Will Spend $159.3 Billion on Games in 2020; The Market Will Surpass $200 Billion by 2023
they are not. But going with RDNA and Turing they were fairly comparable.Since amd confirmed there will be IPC increase with RDNA 2 it will only represent better performance.
I like hims new poof.
He an hero'd.
.... what?
I think it’s fairly obvious that AMD made a calculated decision to take a cores based approach to getting performance scaling on a general purpose cpu. There are trade offs, physics is physics, but given we’ve been stuck struggling to get past 5ghz for about twelvety years it seems that maybe it’s a practical limit for our materials science (given Power has the same problem) and going with multi core and building back up on hz was a practical approach
The clock speeds on Ryzen are fine. AMD has smashed Intel in the face performance wise, for near enough 3 years after basically coming back from near “ relevance death” They’ve been absolutely metronomic with releasing their roadmap, which has always been clear exactly what they were aiming for and whilst rumors still were told that it’s getting the last 300mhz and IPC gains they need in the next wave to nail yet more of the performance use cases they don’t already have.
If those are ‘problems’ I’d really hate to see how they’d be doing if it was all plain sailing. Well I wouldn’t I’d laugh.
we’ll never know (and it constantly amazes me the attention lithography gets ‘round here) how much nvidia got or lost by getting on Samsung but I’m damn sure theyd take the ‘Issues’ with TSMC processes in a heartbeat.
even if AMD has an absolute disaster this round (again), they still cause a major threat on a long timeline, just because they’re not the cash starved drain circler they have been. NVidias biggest long term protector of their uncontested crown, is CUDA and nothing to do with gaming.
me, I’ll just sit with my amd cpu and nvidia gpu and not give a shit. Fair weather to both of ‘em. Competition creates winners.
Factum
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Look, it's quite simple. AMD had higher clockspeeds pre-Ryzen on less dense nodes. Part of the issue is likely architecture but AMD didn't really get much of a bump to clockspeed going from GloFo 16/12 Zen and Zen+ and definitely a lot less than many people were expecting. Clockspeed simply isn't there and that is an issue. I have no doubt there are physics/materials issues with going above 5Ghz but even Zen2 doesn't even remotely reach it even during short bursts of boost. Intel has the same issue with their 10nm node although some of the issues there are different. The fact is there are issues. I didn't say Ryzen is crap. I didn't say Ryzen is underperforming. I sure as hell wouldn't have a Ryzen in my system or my son's if they were crap.
You and others have completely missed the point of my post. The node doesn't matter if the performance is there. However, there can be issues depending on the node. However, at this time we don't know if there are inherent problems with the Samsung process nVidia is using. We do know there is a lower clockspeed issue with TSMC 7nm compared to older processes. One of those issues is heat dissipation. Packing so many transistors into such a small package creates massive issues when trying to get rid of the heat and that in turn will definitely affect clock speeds if the energy requirements to power the transistors doesn't drop enough to offset the higher density.
I didn't and haven't said AMD is failing at 7nm. To say that would be stupid considering the success of Zen2. Looking at Navi there are power and heat problems. That's likely the primary reason we never saw "Big Navi". To scale the architecture up as it was to create Big Navi would have used too much power and created too much heat. I definitely think AMD made the perfect choice to stop with the 5700XT. Navi2 on the other hand is probably a different beast. It's very likely AMD managed to get the power under control with some changes made. It's almost guaranteed to have happened otherwise nVidia wouldn't have dropped prices on the new GPU models rather drastically. That's what I mean by it doesn't matter what node something is fabbed on if the performance is there.
DukenukemX
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Firstly, mobile doesn't count. As dominate as they are in gaming, it's actually mobile gaming they dominate in. When mobile games receive AAA games that cost $60 then let me know. Secondly I'm talking about within the past 10 years. Here's PC gaming dominating in 2016. Even bigger than the mobile market. Here's PC gaming dominating in 2015. It started to die down after 2017. I wonder why PC gaming did well after 2015? Oh I know, because GTX 970 at $330 and Witcher 3, Phantom Pain, Fallout 4, Batman Arkham Knight, Rocket League, and Undertale all came out in 2015 specifically on PC. Nowadays Red Dead Redemption 2 had a timed release of 1 year before it got to PC and not many great games since. Also graphic cards got much more expensive, thanks to Nvidia.
But despite all that, PC gaming alone commands 23% of the gaming market in 2020, where the PS4+XB1+Switch command 28%. Not one of these consoles alone can command 23%, which is probably why even Sony is porting their games to PC. It is still the biggest gaming platform in 2020, again mobile gaming doesn't count.
Mylex
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Makes sense you are stuck in the past. The new way to make a crap ton of money isnt selling someone a $60 dollar game its micro transactions. They were ahead of the curve thats why you dont seem a mobile game just charging the archaic $60 game model. Why limit yourself to $60 when you prey on people with addictive personalities and get hundreds from them for bonuse spin items on candy crush or reasources on Farmville. Sony already said why they were releasing on PC, because there are pc gamers that will never own one of their systems but would pay for one of their IP's that's collecting dust. It's funny how you try and take console's as a whole apart to try and support your view. That's like me taking the different game stores(Steam windows and linux , EPIC,GOG) and making them different categories.
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Next gen AMD GPU's will be like Ryzen, said AMD to one of reviwers.
Humm, maybe low power consumes that will allow them to put them into smallest device?
If they put performance between 3070-3080 under 170-200w this will open far more market share.
Laptop with 4800+6800@120w with something like rtx io chip, I think that a lot people will jump on. I normally refused laptops but this seems interesting.
Humm, maybe low power consumes that will allow them to put them into smallest device?
If they put performance between 3070-3080 under 170-200w this will open far more market share.
Laptop with 4800+6800@120w with something like rtx io chip, I think that a lot people will jump on. I normally refused laptops but this seems interesting.
They have halo x86 CPUs because Intel cornered itself with the 10nm and 7nm fiascos. Neither ARM players nor Nvidia are in the same position than Intel.
I also read in some part that GPUs are secondary to AMD new strategy with most resources are being spent in the CPUs division.
CyberJunk
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5700xt chip didn't even get hot it was the vrms that would over heat. I'm fact the reference cooler had cooled the VRms better than some AIB designs. Once you got past that they had artificial limiters power allowed to the board. We never really got to see what that chip could really do. With that bad drivers it felt like a beta product but definitely could trade blows with a 2070 super! For100$ less!
sabrewolf732
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Some context behind this?
What constitutes high end and mid range? I.e <$200 is low end? 200-400 mid? >400 high end?
Factum
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They defined in 2018 as systems:
High end: $1800 and up
Mid range: $1000-$1800
Entry level: >$1000
This might give you a better picture (2018 report):
https://www.jonpeddie.com/images/uploads/The_Balance_of_Power_in_Gaming_2018_-_V4.pdf
Halo across any architecture.
Remind me again which arm chips currently out compete in the desktop/server market?
Graviton 2 as far as I can know, and we've all read the benchmarks.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-graviton2&num=8
No they don't really. The margins for AMD are razor thin to keep cost down. It is why Nvidia doesn't even bother to cut them a deal like AMD does.
harmattan
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This is right: the margins on consoles are extraordinarily thin. What providing a component for a console does for AMD is provide a steady, consistent revenue stream which is what quality investors want to see on a balance sheet, and it allows for leverage for loans.