Tuesday, May 21st 2019
Sapphire Reps Leak Juicy Details on AMD Radeon Navi
A Sapphire product manager and PR director, speaking to the Chinese press spilled the beans on AMD's upcoming Radeon Navi graphics card lineup. It looks like with Navi, AMD is targeting the meat of the serious gamer market, at two specific price points, USD $399 with a "Pro" (cut-down) product, and $499 with an "XT" (fully-fledged) product. AMD has two NVIDIA products in its crosshairs, the GeForce RTX 2070, and the RTX 2060. In the interview, the Sapphire rep mentioned "stronger than 2070", when talking about performance numbers, which we assume is for the Navi XT variant - definitely promising. The $399 Navi "Pro" is probably being designed with a performance target somewhere between the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070, so you typically pay $50 more than you would for an RTX 2060, for noticeably higher performance.
Sapphire also confirmed that AMD's Navi does not have specialized ray-tracing hardware on the silicon, but such technology will debut with "next year's new architecture". They also suggested that AMD is unlikely to scale up Navi for the enthusiast segment, and that the Vega-based Radeon VII will continue to be the company's flagship product. On the topic of Radeon VII custom designs, Sapphire commented that "there is no plans for that". On the other hand, Sapphire is actively working on custom designs for the Navi architecture, and mentioned that "work on a "Toxic" version of Navi is complete, and it is watercooled". Many people have speculated that AMD will unveil Navi at its Computex keynote address on May 27. Sapphire confirmed that date, and also added that the launch will be on 7th of July, 2019.
Source:
Zhihu (Blog)
Sapphire also confirmed that AMD's Navi does not have specialized ray-tracing hardware on the silicon, but such technology will debut with "next year's new architecture". They also suggested that AMD is unlikely to scale up Navi for the enthusiast segment, and that the Vega-based Radeon VII will continue to be the company's flagship product. On the topic of Radeon VII custom designs, Sapphire commented that "there is no plans for that". On the other hand, Sapphire is actively working on custom designs for the Navi architecture, and mentioned that "work on a "Toxic" version of Navi is complete, and it is watercooled". Many people have speculated that AMD will unveil Navi at its Computex keynote address on May 27. Sapphire confirmed that date, and also added that the launch will be on 7th of July, 2019.
119 Comments on Sapphire Reps Leak Juicy Details on AMD Radeon Navi
Plus CUDA is nothing more than compute with nice software support over it.
I hope you are not confusing the marketing name for shaders with the architecture of the card.
Moving from 16 CUs per SE in the VII / V64 / Fiji to five? That's a drastic change for sure.
(image source)
But if that was "all" that was needed to dramatically improve per-CU performance (not saying this is a minor change), why wasn't this done years ago?
That is why even Nvidia refers to own cards in terms of "NUMBER OF CUDA CORES".
#omgcudais11yearsold
#turingstillcuda
Stop the stupidity fest, GCN is an instruction set, as it CUDA< what is inside silicon, you have no idea, but it's certainly not the what it was 7 years ago.
Even Vega VII, which is supposed to be a mere die shrink, beats Vega 64 at the same clock/mem speed.
And the power consumption:
CUDA is API. Its counterpart/competitor is OpenCL.
As far as they have publicly said, Nvidia does not have the same type of stable-ish ISA for their GPUs as AMD has with GCN. The closest thing to usable ISA for Nvidia GPUs seems to be PTX which is strictly speaking not ISA but in both functionality and nature more of a middleware (a virtual machine) between actual ISA and API.It only beats Vega 64 there due to bigger memory bandwidth. On your screenshot, 90Mhz (6%) frequency difference on core can be measurable and 300Mhz deficit on memory speed does not make up for the twofold difference in memory bus width (as they note, Radeon VII still has 45% more memory bandwidth on these settings). By the way, the difference between 84,4 and 81,5 is 3.5% which is less than the clock speed difference on the core.
The source for the screenshots is Computerbase's Radeon VII coverage:
www.computerbase.de/2019-02/amd-radeon-vii-test/5/#abschnitt_radeon_vii_vs_vega_64_bei_aehnlicher_rohleistung
That said if Navi really is only 40CU chip it's have to be clocked really high or Perf/TFlops have to be improved a lot for making it near to alleged RTX 2070 performance. I have hard time to believe that number to be real, which make that whole rumor a bit baseless.
All I've said are facts from the Mesa driver developers. You don't believe me? Go complain to them.
Abd