Wednesday, January 31st 2018
Highlights from AMD Earnings Call: Hardened "Zen2" and 7 nm "Vega" by 2019
Following its Q4 and 2017 Annual financial results reveal, AMD CEO Lisa Su, in the company's post-results earnings conference call, made some notable disclosures and guidance. The most interesting - and which shouldn't come as a surprise - is that AMD expects revenues to grow by a staggering 30 percent quarter-over-quarter in Q1-2018, riding on the blockchain (crypto-currency mining) wave. The company's graphics processors offer high efficiency at mining popular crypto-currencies, such as Ethereum, Z-cash, and Bitcoin.
Moving on, Su commented on how her company is coping with the "Meltdown" and "Spectre" CPU vulnerabilities, and reaffirmed that AMD's x86 architectures are slightly safer by design against some of the vulnerabilities; that while the upcoming "Zen+" CPU micro-architecture, which is essentially an optical-shrink of "Zen" to the 12 nanometer process will ship with microcode-level patches against the vulnerabilities, its successor, the "Zen2" micro-architecture, which will be built on the 7 nm process, will feature architecture-level hardening against the vulnerabilities. "Zen 2" tapes out towards the end of 2018, and could see production and marketing in 2019. The other big reveal is the taping out of an optically-shrunk "Vega" architecture implementation on the 7 nm process, taping out within 2018. This isn't "Navi," but possibly a bigger "Vega" chip that leverages 7 nm to have acceptable power/thermals. AMD could tap into the machine-learning market with this silicon first.
Moving on, Su commented on how her company is coping with the "Meltdown" and "Spectre" CPU vulnerabilities, and reaffirmed that AMD's x86 architectures are slightly safer by design against some of the vulnerabilities; that while the upcoming "Zen+" CPU micro-architecture, which is essentially an optical-shrink of "Zen" to the 12 nanometer process will ship with microcode-level patches against the vulnerabilities, its successor, the "Zen2" micro-architecture, which will be built on the 7 nm process, will feature architecture-level hardening against the vulnerabilities. "Zen 2" tapes out towards the end of 2018, and could see production and marketing in 2019. The other big reveal is the taping out of an optically-shrunk "Vega" architecture implementation on the 7 nm process, taping out within 2018. This isn't "Navi," but possibly a bigger "Vega" chip that leverages 7 nm to have acceptable power/thermals. AMD could tap into the machine-learning market with this silicon first.
27 Comments on Highlights from AMD Earnings Call: Hardened "Zen2" and 7 nm "Vega" by 2019
There's a reason Vega 56 sells for more than the 1080 Ti right now, demand.
Let's go down the list of common algos
Ethash - > fastest common card is a 1080ti/vega. 1070 beats out the 480/580 and the p104-100 beats out both of those.
Cryptonight - > amd biased
Lyra2rev2 - > nvidia biased
Neoscrypt - > nvidia biased
Equihash - > nvidia biased
Timetravel2 - > nvidia biased
Lyra2h - > nvidia biased
Groestl - > nvidia biased
Keccak - > nvidia biased
Lbry - > nvidia biased
Pascal - > nvidia biased
Also the common price of a 1080ti is $1500 vega 56/64 runs $1200 give or take and you can get fe cards for less than that. The 1080ti also makes more money per day. I have both. I watch values pretty heavily and move to coins that make the most. I have my 1080tis pushing $12-15 a day as long as pool luck doesn't tank on me again. My Vega cards do $8-10.
OH and if you find a bitcoin with a gpu you let me know. As of right now in the realm of feasibility you cannot mining bitcoin with gpus.Heed your own advice.
Edit: Also, I was right on the money when I said AMD will do what Intel did and offer hardware fixes, but only in Zen2.
The original AMD statement was the Tape out will be in 2H18, meaning it can be from July to December, so if we're lucky to have the earliest assumption, it will be like End of 1Q19 like April, same timeframe as the original Zen & the launch time of Zen+.. if we're not lucky then we might get it at the end of 2019.
Plus, GDDR6 can have the same bandwidth as HBM3 so it wouldn't even be a limiting factor.
Ethereum is a massive network and one of the most well known. Tons of FUD spins around the web telling people amd is better in everything and we have massive sales on both sides.500 billion market cap for just cryptocurrency we won't get into volume of sale for gpus.
"slackers" don't buy Boeing 747's filled with gpus and fly them to Iceland. That's how far crypto has gone this year. This isn't kids using mom's basement for video cards.
Still, mining is one of the stupidest thing ever. Basically wasting computing resources.
RNDR coin is aimed at making cloud gaming more doable, there is talk of using blockchain tech to track diamonds (preventing blood diamond trade), there is already stuff out for F@H style coins.
Human nature i guess.
Don't get me wrong. Nothing wrong with that. All living organism does it, every living thing is there only for the survival of themselves.
And here's proof that not all miners are selfish bastards:
venturebeat.com/2017/12/27/internet-archive-gets-1-million-donation-from-philanthropic-bitcoin-pineapple-fund/
www.ccn.com/bitcoin-charity-sends-free-software-foundation-1-million-donation/
But let's do some quick math at msrp 30 580's is $6900 just in graphics cards, 30 1070's is $12000 just in graphics cards. Most of mom's basement kids don't have 8-15 thousand dollars just sitting there. Just put some perspective in that.
And the Boeing comment matches the news story that hit here of investors renting Boeing 747's to pick up gpus. That isn't lazy.
Your description of lazy apparently is everyone in any kind of supervision roll though. I take it you are a low level employee who works and gets mad the guys above him in your eyes don't?
but to return to an earlier point you made. most are optimised for nv cards as they have more cards out in the wild. they have lead the market share for a few years and as such the demand to make the most of the available hardware trumps any need to optimise them for the better hardware.
They have really rented a Boeing to get the gpu's? Is there an article about it? This actually shows how lazy people are. They make such an effort just to do nothing :)
Amazing :)
On the other hand it's investors. If they can get easy cash they will and with the resources they got it's still profitable. It's like with 5 cards don't even bother but with 50 you are golden for some time. Then you will need 100 to make it profitable and so on. you also need some different perspective in my opinion.
Your last comment wasn't nice you know. It would seem that aggression comes from you since you're losing arguments :) I pity people like you who think they know all. you talk about perspective but yours is narrow. Like looking through binoculars. You can see far but you don't see it all.
Nice math btw :)