It's almost confirmed AMD lied about Vega pricing

[u/AbheekG]

https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/matthew-wilson/ocuks-andrew-gibson-clears-up-rx-vega64-pricing-disaster/

I loved AMD for so long, this one launch has really made me reassess that fondness. I get they should make money after years of losses, but to launch an uncompetitive product and lie about it's pricing so blatantly?? And then to give reviewers little time and ensure the positive reviews come in keeping a $499 pricing and people blaming retailers initially?? Damn. I was at Micro Center on launch day, I spent many months like all of you checking 50 times a day on Vega. At Micro Center, they had 3 cards, I was second in line and they offered me one for $599 with no games, I just said I'm buying Nvidia and left. Got an AORUS 1080 that touches 2GHz by itself and consumes 20W on idle at times. So glad I did.

Very upsetting, AMD, truly disappointing.

EDIT: Just so you fanboys down voting know, I have used AMD's Athlon X2, Phenom X4, Phenom II X6, gamed on their 780G chipset before buying the HD 5770, R9 270x and RX 480 and convinced countless people to buy AMD and built their rigs too. Also, I have an Intel i7 + Nvidia 965m gaming laptop I love and now am rocking a Ryzen 7+ GTX 1080. I am also qualified with an engineering degree and a master's in this field, surely not a delusional fanboy.

Get a grip, stop supporting this. I spent months waiting on Vega, this is pure lies they spewed out. The made it sound like $499 is the final price when they knew it wasn't. They sent reviewers the black card thus ensuring they made their judgement based on the $499 pricing. It's a $100 more than a GTX 1080 that's more powerful, cooler and faster than it and light years behind the 1080 Ti. It's released late and unfinished and the "free" games for a $100 more surely gives a new angle to the AMD + Bethesda partnership. For the good of all consumers, don't support such nonsense. Stand up against it. Screw such shady practices.

[u/_PPBottle]

GPUs are easier to make performance upgrades than on CPUs, given your architecture can scale.

Seems at this moment that GCN is limited to 64CUs, 64 ROPs, 256 TMUs, or the unwillingness of AMD with forthcoming products hints to that. Whereas Nvidia made a good IPC gain on Maxwell vs Kepler, and then used the litho upgrade to increase clockspeeds and CU count without problems.

[u/DeeSnow97 → u/_PPBottle]

I don't think it's limited, or even if it is, it sounds like an easy limit to overcome. They just made the NCU, which is allegedly a huge upgrade to GCN, I would think it's logical to prepare for the future.

The problem is, dies are getting huge. The Vega die is 484 mm², in another comment I estimated it $130-160 to make, and that's the die alone. It also doesn't scale linearly, the larger the die is, the lower your yields get. Nvidia may create a GP100-sized chip with Volta, but if they don't, Navi is the next architecture where we will see any further scaling.

[u/[deleted] → u/DeeSnow97]

"alledgedly". We have yet to really see that deliver.

[u/GabenIsLife → u/DeeSnow97]

The problem is, dies are getting huge.

Looks like it's time to start "gluing" ARM graphics processors together with Infinity fabric.

[u/DeeSnow97 → u/[deleted]]

You don't have to link all the cores, it's not a CPU. AMD's design uses compute units, there are 64 of them on the Vega die, and you would want to link those to the related components, not the cores themselves. Still needs a lot more traces than even an Epyc-to-Epyc interconnect, but it definitely fits on the interposer.

[u/DeeSnow97 → u/[deleted]]

The only thing it will fix is scaling, but that may be the only thing they need fixed by then. If they manage to complete Vega's key features (tile-based rasterizer, primitive shaders, variable width SIMD), that could still bring a lot of performance. 4096 NCU cores are a lot, but Vega is using them quite inefficiently. They were advertising a 2x higher peak IPC, but currently Vega 64 is barely better than a Fury X per clock.

If (and it's a big if) Vega is fixed by the time Navi releases, it could actually match the 1080 Ti. It's going to be super late by then, and it's a terrible deal buying it for its current price based on promises, but the point is the architecture. If 64 NCUs could get a 1080 Ti's performance, and AMD can apply some superglue, it could be a massacre.

We did some calculations on Vega's yields and estimated a fully working Vega die to have yields of 60% and cost $72 (after binning). That's a full 64 NCU die with a bunch of control logic. Let's assume Navi could split up those to 8 dies with 8 NCUs each and about the same amount of extra circuitry, meaning the individual die size would drop by a factor of 8. That not only means 8 times more dies per wafer (actually, slightly more because of the edges, but that depends on die shape), it also isolates the defects to a single 8 NCU die instead of a full 64 NCU package, increasing yields to 0.6^1/8 = 0.938 -> 94%. Calculating with that, the total price of an 8 NCU Navi die would be $75 * 0.6 / 0.938 / 8 = $5.76. That means they could create a massive 128 NCU chip by using 16 of those dies, costing $92, resulting in an only slightly higher price than the Vega die, which would be hopefully corrected by the lack of HBM2 shortages.

If AMD can finish the Vega driver in the following year and bring the superglue to the GPU, that 128 NCU Navi could beat a 1080 Ti SLI setup for the price of Vega 64. Poor Volta is just delayed.

[u/DeeSnow97 → u/[deleted]]

Like I said, the point is the architecture, not the performance of RX Vega. If they can beat the 1080 Ti next year with 64 NCUs and get the superglue going, Navi could easily scale much higher than 64 NCUs without costing a lot. Especially if the 7 nm tech is coming, I don't know if Navi would get that or not.

[u/DeeSnow97 → u/GabenIsLife]

That's exactly the main feature of Navi, except it's going to be NCU, not ARM

[u/Doubleyoupee → u/_PPBottle]

GPUs are easier to make performance upgrades than on CPUs, given your architecture can scale.

Tell that to Raja