Where the hell is NAVI???????????

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The now 3 times rebranded RX 480 has fallen so far behind its become really rather ridiculous, Vega 56 is also an old high end card repriced to compete with todays mid-range cards, because of HBM 2 at what i think is a loss for AMD...

AMD with Ryzen are doing a sublime job, in terms of competition Ryzen has Intel by the scuff of the neck and is bouncing them off the walls, Ryzen CPU's consistently occupy all top 3 best sellers on 'Rainforest', often even pushing Intel out of the top 5, and there doesn't seem to be anything that Intel can do about it.

But please, for crying out loud where is Navi?????????????

 

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I doubt we’ll see AMD return to competing at the ultra high end as in my experience, people just buy nVidia at that kind of price anyway, no matter what AMD do.

This is true but a lot of people buy their cards in the sub £300 range, when they are competitive like the RX 580 vs GTX 1060 actually was.

 

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This as this week alone we've sold 600+ Vega 56 cards, easily our best selling card right now by miles!

Yeah, its a great card for little money, but i can't see AMD making any money on those now, i suspect they are losing money on everyone they sell and as you yourself said its really not good having the profitable part of the business prop up the failing part.

I would rather AMD stopped making retail cards than run their business like that, we can't have the retail GPU part of the business draining resources away from everything else.

 

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If that card is still in production, now, if they are not just selling off surplus stock they are in trouble...

 

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So it was okay when AMD were diverting all the resources they could into the cpu side of the business to create Zen but now that succeeded they can't do it the other way round? For the last 6 or 7 years the gpu side of the business has suffered while R&D funds were diverted for Zen, As Lisa Su said some time ago they've been able to increase RTG's budget, so they're in the process of getting RTG back in the game, it just takes time.

Well no... AMD GPU's post the Bulldozer era, Hawaii (R9 290X) Polaris (RX 480 RX 580 RX 590) Fiji (Fury X)

That's 3 architectures during the development of Zen, successful architectures so i don't buy the idea that Zen was at the expense of GPU's.

Aside from that you're missing the point i'm making, they are making cards for retail to sell at a loss, not just Vega 56 and 64 but one of AMD's own people said Vega VII cost $700 to make, GN calculated the 8GB of HBM2 on Vega 56/64 costs them $160, add the GPU ontop of that and then the cooler, PCB partners make who want profit ontop of that and then the retailer also want a profit, by the time they get to Gibbo they have about $250 worth of components profits in them so they have to start at AMD's end selling to board partners at below cost, Vega Vii has twice as many HBM2 modules on it.

This is money thrown away on retail cards that should go on developing Navi, getting it ready

 

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Right ^^^ that's why they are doing it, its screaming "Hey we are still here"

 

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uh oh

I hope not....

 

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They aren't though

Meh...

Your not alone, I think most of us on here want AMD to do well with Navi, but if Jim is hearing bad tiding from different sources, then something is probably up.
We can only hope it is not something disastrous.

As for why AMD did the cut price VEGA's for a short stint recently it was purely to rain on NVidia's parade of the 1660ti, which in a lot of the benches and reviews I have seen leaves the 590 and lower bracket standing in the dust. Of course it is too expensive but very quick for the segment it is slotting into.

I know.

@nashathedog i hear what you are saying and i agree, i don't suppose AMD have much choice given that as Bru points out Polaris just isn't competitive now, i would really rather AMD didn't sell cards at a loss but if they didn't they wouldn't have a card on the market for gamers.

 

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@ANDREW GREEN

To quote Jim from the earlier linked Twitter feed.

Try to understand the difference between me "thinking out loud" and making a statement of fact. Way, way too many of you guys have ~@£$!^ comprehension issues. I throw a lot of stuff "out there" just because it helps to get closer to the eventual truth.

I'm just talking in general. Every time I talk about something even slightly "out there" or a tiny bit controversial it's immediately assumed and declared as a 100% statement of fact.

Of course he is trying to carve out a career in Hardware Journalism, i wish him all the best in that and i happen to think that as a Journalist he's better than any of the established ones because he has a better understanding than almost all of them and puts the research in for complex analysis, most of which are his opinions based on said analysis.

He is what Hardware Journalism used to be and largely no longer is.

 

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I'm with Bru on this, if there was a 'significant' core count difference then i would agree a portion of the GPU is dud and salvaged, but they both have the same number of compute units actually clocked slightly higher on Vega VII, and they both have 16GB of memory.

 

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IMO Navi will be around Verga VII / RTX 2080 but under £400, at which point nVidia will release Turing cards without RT to compete.

 

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Won’t they eventually just compete with themselves

I don't know what you mean by that?

 

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I mean I assume that there’s a chunk of space used up by the rt cores that they can replace with raster ones, I doubt they would, but stranger things have happened.

It would then be ultimately ‘better’ if you don’t care for RTX. (Good for the consumer mind you)

That is true, yes they could.

That's fits with my crazy, completely unsubstantiated theory that the Navi 10 used in RX 3080 is a cut down variant leaving the full-fat Navi 10 waiting in the wings. RX 3080 is leaked at Vega 64 +15% performance, so a full-fat Navi 10 would probably be Vega 64 +25% or so, which is directly Radeon VII performance. Ditch the HBM2 for GDDR6 and the price comes down to something sensible.

Right...

 

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I like Raja as a person but i don't think he did a very good job with his GPU's, the last "great" GPU AMD made was the R9 290X, that was Pre Raja, Fiji and Vega are his.

He was also divisive wanting to separate the GPU division from AMD, its why we ended up with RTG, who no longer exist BTW, its all just AMD again, GPU's under AMD: HD 4000 series, HD 5000 series, HD 6000 series, HD 7000 series and R5/7/9 200 series, all great GPU's, it wasn't until Raja took over that we got very large and expensive under performing GPU's.

AMD's next test will be Navi.

 

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I just want to upgrade from a 980Ti with decent performance at a sensible price, there is simply nothing on the market that offers that right now and Navi is looking like it will fall short too

I'm in the same boat, a worthwhile upgrade for us might be the RTX 2070 at 30% faster, but at £500 for that nVidia can #### off, really a proper upgrade would be the RTX 2080 but at £650?????? yeah... pick a kidney, any kidney....

 

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Something cannot be right here....

 

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Vega 56 performance on an APU is surely impossible. That would re-define everything

Exactly.

 

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If that's true it could bring real competition back to the GPU market, looks like a real power house of a GPU...

 

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Well, ask yourself: why would Sony pay AMD (and work with them) to polish the aging turd that is GCN, when AMD have a brand new ground-up architecture coming straight after?

Seems more likely that Sony would work with AMD on their new architecture, not their ancient one.