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AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

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Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#41
post #36
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$699 matches the MSRP for the RTX 2080: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=427&sort=pri...

But you aren't usually going to be finding them that cheap. That will probably be the case with the VII too, but we don't know yet.

Well, that's why I linked to PCPartPicker, to show that RTX 2080 models at MSRP do exist. They may have been scarce at launch, but they can be purchased today less than 4 months later.

Since AMD will sell the Radeon VII directly at first, I think early adopters will probably face limited quantities rather than price markups (not counting unauthorized resellers). After that, we'll have to see how the situation with retailers and later on non-reference models shakes out.

Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Based on the pixel sparkling in the video I've seen if Battlefield, it looks like Nvidia's raytracing is being used for each pixel. I'm not sure if it has to be that way or if it's just underoptomozed at the moment. 1-sample per pixel is already incredibly low for raytracing. A raw 1 spp raytraced image looks HORRIBLE. The reason why it looks anywhere close to usable is because NVidia post-processes all of that noi…

Ya that's kind of what I'm getting at. If your physically accurate rendering is pushing the hardware limits so far that you need extensive post processing to maintain the framerate then it stops being so physically accurate. At that point, it seems like there are more interesting things you can do with the hardware than a naive raytrace that would look and perform better while, admittedly, not being 100% physically a…

I'd be very surprised if most common usage of RTX would turn out to be anything even remotely physically accurate.

A more likely use in the immediate future is to simplify some parts of the rendering pipeline, and improve quality on a few others. Without looking too much into to it, improving and simplifying soft shadows and are lighting seems like a no-brainer. Both are really hard to implement efficiently using rasterization, and/but both needs a good denoiser.

Will be interesting to see thought. I believe it's a bit later than I predicted that we get to see real time ray tracing on commodity hardware, but what is a couple of years over a few decades?

Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it shows that GCN is reaching the end of its usable life. It's not been a bad microarchitecture - but hopefully Navi does something different so they aren't hamstrung in the same way.

NAVI is still GCN likely the same 15-25% uptick over Polaris as we’ve seen with this new Vega, 2020-2021 is when the next gen uArch is going to come. GCN’s vector machine doesn’t scale as well as NVIDIA’s scalar architecture NVIDIA can add cores without caring about concurrency or ILP, since each core is an individually addressable scalar ALU, this is why “async” compute doesn’t benefit them as much as it does GCN ca…

Your comment is extremely confused. Let's unpack some of the confusion...

> NVIDIA’s scalar architecture

NVidia doesn't have a scalar architecture in any meaningful sense of the word. Individual work items execute in warps, meaning (up to) 32 items execute the same instruction, at the same PC. If you have divergence, i.e. fewer than 32 items at the same instruction, you lose ALU throughput. This is the same as in AMD (and every other GPU architecture out there, for that matter).

The difference to AMD's architecture since Volta is that there is hardware support for each SIMD lane having its own PC, which makes it easier to have independent forward progress and a bunch of other features. The separate lanes don't have separate instruction fetch, though -- they all execute the same instruction (and if they can't, then some lanes will be disabled).

> this is why “async” compute doesn’t benefit them as much as it does GCN cards

Nvidia literally cannot do async compute in the same way as AMD, because their micro-architecture cannot switch between graphics and compute on as finely grained a basis as GCN cards. That's why they don't benefit from async compute. (Though I'm not sure whether that's still true since Volta.)

> GCN cards that have a 4 wide SIMD array

GCN has 64-wide waves, though with a bit of a weird execution scheduling which means that 16 lanes out of the 64 are computing at a time. Nowhere in GCN are there any 4-wide SIMD arrays.

> a massive external compute scheduler that sits idle when doing graphics.

Also nonsense. Both AMD and Nvidia have the majority of die space allocated to the compute cores (whatever they're calling them). The pieces of fixed function logic that distribute work onto the cores (whether for graphics or compute) are comparatively tiny.

Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#44
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deep learning enthusiasts probably will stick to NVIDIA cards We've been building the wrong hardware for ML for a while now. A TPU doesn't delivery supremacy for problems over GPU hardware. It's a Google senior engineering retention and PR project. Exceedingly few problems resemble image recognition. You wouldn't be able to tell from the research, because due to the tools it's sort of the only affordable thing to d…

What is the right hardware for ML?

That will certainly depend on the kind of ML you want to run. What is the right hardware for computing?

Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#45
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deep learning enthusiasts probably will stick to NVIDIA cards We've been building the wrong hardware for ML for a while now. A TPU doesn't delivery supremacy for problems over GPU hardware. It's a Google senior engineering retention and PR project. Exceedingly few problems resemble image recognition. You wouldn't be able to tell from the research, because due to the tools it's sort of the only affordable thing to d…

What is the right hardware for ML?

Seems like what you need for inference is usually very different from what you need for training.

Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Larabee. Too early and too expensive for its time.

So that's why Xeon Phi has been so successful! /s Real talk, though. Why do you think larabee is the "right" hardware?

I'd assume because of the extra serial processing power of a CPU.

x86 isn't the right choice though. As the chips get smaller, all the x86 cruft starts to become a larger portion of each core.

RISCV with 40-ish instructions plus a SIMD extension would probably be ideal. They've already proven that those designs use less space per core than ARM.

Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#47
post #19

Its an interesting design for sure. 4x Stacks of HBM2 means 1TBps memory bandwidth at 16GB. Only 60-compute units enabled (maybe 4-CUs are expected to break during manufacturing? Its a weird number for sure...). Since it shares dies with the MI50, the Radeon VII will have 1/2 speed double-precision, making this the cheapest high-performance double-precision card in existance. ------ FP16 compute is supported at doubl…

There's no guarantee this won't have gimped FP64, Hawaii for example had 1/2 rate FP64 but the consumer cards were 1/8 speed. But even 1/8 would leave the 1/32 NVIDIA cards in the dust. If they don't gimp FP64 it won't leave a whole lot of reason to buy the MI50 for probably 10x the price.

What AMD needs right now is marketshare so more stuff gets written in something cross-platform instead of cuda. I'd imagine that 1/2 has at least been discussed at great length for this card.

Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#48
post #37
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transcoding videos is a scourge?! I mean, maybe you think their choice to deploy as an ERC20 was a bad choice; fine. But they're not adding any additional computation to the environment. I don't understand how it's possible to think that LivePeer is bad for the environment without thinking the same thing about, for example, Elastic Transcoder. Your comment reads like a non-sequitur to me.

Presumably hughes is just making a knee-jerk comment about how 99% of PoW systems are doing useless work. Personally I am very skeptical of any system that tries to do proof of useful work like transcoding; it seems vulnerable to cheating.

Hi wmf - I work on Livepeer, happy to clarify on some of the skepticism here.

Livepeer uses cryptographic signatures to prove authenticity of the video transcoding results, and that signature can be used as proof to punish cheaters (if you signed the result, you are responsible for the correctness - and since it's easy to validate whether the transcoding is done correctly, anyone can use that signature to punish you by taking away your stake). If no one cheats, no one gets punished. Since the cheater doesn't know how many people are monitoring the results, their best strategy is to be honest.

Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#49
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably hughes is just making a knee-jerk comment about how 99% of PoW systems are doing useless work. Personally I am very skeptical of any system that tries to do proof of useful work like transcoding; it seems vulnerable to cheating.

Hi wmf - I work on Livepeer, happy to clarify on some of the skepticism here. Livepeer uses cryptographic signatures to prove authenticity of the video transcoding results, and that signature can be used as proof to punish cheaters (if you signed the result, you are responsible for the correctness - and since it's easy to validate whether the transcoding is done correctly, anyone can use that signature to punish you…

Hey ericxtang. I've met your boy Phillip a few times (that's how I found out about LivePeer) - solid guy. Very good ambassador for your project and all that it can mean for the world.

Re: AMD Radeon VII: High-End 7nm Vega Video Card

#50
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Larabee. Too early and too expensive for its time.

So that's why Xeon Phi has been so successful! /s Real talk, though. Why do you think larabee is the "right" hardware?

The truth is that for many types/sizes of models AVS2 or AVS512 in Xeons is as fast and GPUs.
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