> If the rumor mill is to be believed, AMD’s incoming high-end graphics card could be a monster board bristling with 80 CUs (compute units)
I thought modern GPUs had hundreds of cores, or is a compute unit something different?
AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
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Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#102> If the rumor mill is to be believed, AMD’s incoming high-end graphics card could be a monster board bristling with 80 CUs (compute units) I thought modern GPUs had hundreds of cores, or is a compute unit something different?
Imagine you have a fleet of 64 buses each filled with 64 passengers. Does that count as 64 individual vehicles or as 4096?
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#103AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (o…
I recently purchased a laptop with an Nvidia/Intel composite setup. As a Linux user, I’ll never buy a laptop with an Nvidia GPU again (if I can help it). What a pain. A nice piece of hardware with relatively pathetic software to drive it.
I think using pop-os can solve the problem
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#104Even if everything the article says is true, and the AMD software environment was also improved to compete with Nvidia, it's probably still not enough to beat Nvidia.
The best they are claiming with Big Navi is 30% faster than a 2080 Ti. Sounds great, but they are comparing a card that won't be available for a year with a card that has been on the market for over a year already. Nvidia will have been working on faster stuff, and the best case for AMD is that they force Nvidia to release their next generation of products faster than they originally planned.
This isn't the same case as Intel which had been struggling with their 10nm process and security issues, which meant their current chips actually slowed down and they didn't have any new answers ready when AMD came out with Zen 2. We have seen that Nvidia has an answer for everything that AMD has done so far (price drops and Super variants to make the Nvidia cards remain the best choice at every level), and likely has an answer for their next few steps. I think the best that AMD can hope for is to achieve parity, they certainly won't be dethroning Nvidia.
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#105AMD is blocked by being not versatile enough. Their consumer cards support neither AI nor do they have good Linux drivers. Of course, the average gamer doesn't care, but developers do. And as the result, almost all the video games - their core sales driver - are not as thoroughly optimized and tested on AMD as they are on the (likely overpriced) NVIDIA cards that developers use in their own home rigs.
I chose an AMD card specifically because of their great Linux drivers. Building a system on top of proprietary drivers is a non starter for me. Being heavily dependent on a vendor to support your platform has bitten me multiple times and it's especially frustrating when a proprietary software company uses something like electron but never ships a Linux release. Running these applications in wine is a complete pain in the ass and doesn't even work 90% of the time.
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d like a card that is a 2080 but instead used all the extra transistors compared to a 1080 for traditional rendering, not raytracing. Raytracing might be a thing in the future but now it’s just a gimmick that uses silicon that could have churned out more frames instead.
The RT hardware takes up a small fraction of die area based on some articles I read a year ago. Furthermore, RT isn’t a gimmick: it’s literally the holy grail of graphics. Ask yourself why AMD, Intel, and consoles are all moving to it this year.
Regarding the holy grail point, I like to exagerrate and say that rasterization is based on glorified sprite rotoscalers. It is not used because it models how light works, it is used because it allows fast hardware implementations. On the software side, it's lots of hacks until it looks mostly believable.
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#107I don't know where they make their money, but if the hope is to compete in compute, I'd suggest that they do not "play the game" at all in GPUs and instead put together something 7nm and TPU-like. If I were them, I'd be working on that right now. 1TFLOPs/W would be a good goal, 100TFLOPs in 100W, using bfloat 16. Sidestep the GPU bullshit entirely, print money in a niche instead.
I wouldn't consider TPU/NPU/NNPUs a niche. It's inevitable at this point that you'll need machine learning accelerators just for running inferencing on edge devices.
Even if done only on the cloud I can see more could providers investing in their own TPU-like hardware for their clusters.
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#108AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. Nvidia's memory compression is very impressive and allows them to do better with a narrower memory bus in many situations (such as games), however if your data is not so compressible (o…
AMD's rather old Radeon VII can really smash a 2080 Ti if you're doing relatively simple streaming computation, like say video processing. That 1TB/s HBM is no joke, and there's 16GB of it, at ~half the price of the 2080 Ti with 11GB. The Radeon VII is also pretty fast in training transformer networks. In some models that I trained, it was only ~25% slower than our Quadro RTX 5000s.
On Tensorflow ROC (or whatever the name is?)
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, I dropped Linux due bad graphics drivers (AMD)
Are you really saying that AMD is worse than Nvidia on Linux ??? I have a Nvidia GPU (on my laptop), and I've had a truly horrible experience on Linux with Nvidia proprietary drivers. I was actually considering ditching my laptop, and buying a new one with AMD chipsets, due to the issues I've had on Linux due to the presence of the Nvidia graphics card. I occasionally play games on my Linux laptop, using Proton (a St…
The NVidia Optimus switchable cards are not well supported on Linux.
On desktop NVidia is good. On laptops I like Intel graphics. because I don't want to muck around with getting working drivers.
Re: AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
#110Cuda and ... it is not just hardware.