AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October • Hacker News Board

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#131

Post by dragontamer » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

Vvector wrote: post #124

dragontamer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Navi just began to compile a week or two ago. Still 'unsupported', but its slowly gaining features. ROCm is a bit uneven with what cards it supports. Ex: Rx 550 never was supported (even though Polaris, the rest of the 5xx series worked). It seems like the only cards ROCm works for are the ones that share a chip and/or driver with AMD's "Machine Intelligence" line of cards. (MI50, MI60, etc. etc.). Which are Fiji (Rx…

> Navi just began to compile a week or two ago. Still 'unsupported', but its slowly gaining features. 14 months after release, still unsupported. AMD needs to step up to the plate if they want to be seriously considered in the AI world.

Its pretty clear what's going on: AMD doesn't have the resources to support all the GPUs they release on ROCm. They focus on the "MI" line of cards, which have similarities to the consumer GPUs. (Ex: Rx Fury is very similar to MI8).

Because MI8 and Rx Fury have similarities, AMD gives ROCm support to both. Ditto with MI25 and Vega, and MI6 and Rx 580.

EDIT: With "Navi" gaining features in ROCm repos, my bet is that a new MI-card based on RDNA2 might be coming out soon. Maybe its Arcturus (the Exascale GPU for the Frontier supercomputer).

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#132

Post by nitrogen » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #122

zamalek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I'm personally hoping to complete my current build as a "Red Box" (AMD CPU, AMD GPU). However, facts are facts. DLSS 1.9 was impressive, but has its problems and would understandably be avoided by most gamers. DLSS 2 is a whole different story[1], and is highly likely to be something that most gamers enable. 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards for PC gamers (depending on whether you prefer high re…

> 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards Those are $1200+ monitors at any decent resolution. EDIT: by resolution I mean the horizontal dimension of the monitor, where pc enthusiasts typically go for 27+ inches in width which are more expensive as you scale in size, add a curve, etc.

And you're talking about $600-$1200 GPUs, plus similar or higher for CPU+MB+RAM. People who buy these things are willing to pay for maximum performance.

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#133

Post by the_pwner224 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #122

zamalek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I'm personally hoping to complete my current build as a "Red Box" (AMD CPU, AMD GPU). However, facts are facts. DLSS 1.9 was impressive, but has its problems and would understandably be avoided by most gamers. DLSS 2 is a whole different story[1], and is highly likely to be something that most gamers enable. 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards for PC gamers (depending on whether you prefer high re…

> 4K/60 or 1440p/240 are the golden standards Those are $1200+ monitors at any decent resolution. EDIT: by resolution I mean the horizontal dimension of the monitor, where pc enthusiasts typically go for 27+ inches in width which are more expensive as you scale in size, add a curve, etc.

You can get a real good quality 4k60 for $400, or one with shitty color for much less. The LG 27gn950 is 4k144 + full DCI-P3 for $800, but unfortunately has been sold out everywhere since it was released a week or two ago.

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#134

Post by capableweb » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #85

packetlost wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not super interested in Linux gaming, I just want my desktop to be usable.

Honest question: If you're not interested in gaming, why even get a discrete GPU and not an integrated one? Are you interested in using it for other purposes?

I'm not the author of the previous comments but I use Linux, not interested in gaming, and I have a dedicated GPU (2080ti). Mostly for working with Blender and Houdini, where the integrated one would work as well as using the CPU, at least for the workloads I'm dealing with, so having a dedicated GPU for both simulations and rendering helps a lot to speed up the workflows.

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#135

Post by nitrogen » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:09 PM UTC

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #129

ziml77 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the home, I like to consider performance-per-watt. More power draw means more heat and more heat means less comfort for much of the year.

I think you're overestimating the thermal pollution. A human is 100W-120W. The Zen 3 is about 180-220W. That pales to comparison to the cost of cooling a home where air conditioning systems have 36,000BTU or 10,000W.

Unless your AC is designed specifically with your PC in mind, and is adequately sized for your house (not a guarantee), a hot, noisy PC or laptop still makes its local area uncomfortable.

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#136

Post by kushalpandya » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

I feel RDNA 2, at the very best would prove to be something in between of what Zen+ and Zen 2 was against Intel, so while it may not outperform Nvidia on highest end, it ends up providing an overall better value, leading to people buying over Nvidia.

It is worth noting that unlike, Intel, Nvidia isn't sitting ducks when it comes to GPU innovation so that's a harder hill to climb for AMD. And fortunately AMD now has their cash cow running with Ryzen, EPYC and Consoles so they can allocate more R&D budget for GPU.

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#137

Post by moonbas3 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #89

I recently bought a Ryzen 3900X. I hope Linux eventually supports these processors better. There has been some serious stabilization issues I eventually tracked down to being related to my processor. These issues required me to spend a significant amount of time researching. Things seem to just work with Intel processors. I'm hoping as popularity increases support for these processors will improve.

I've been running a 3900x under Linux since release (got it 14.07) without any issues. Support was great day one, but of course you needed a new kernel, not something that was running on your 2010 web server.

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#138

Post by argb » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

technofiend wrote: post #25

PedroBatista wrote: post #6

Rumor has it AMD has a competitive GPU but will not pursue the high-end market mostly because of their limited TSMC slots, they can make much more money from a CPU wafer than a GPU one ( due to area size and yield ) But I really hope I'm wrong and they kick Nvidia ass since they become such intolerable arrogant anti-competitive pricks in the last +10 years.

The last time I owned an AMD video card was more than a decade ago. At the time their video card drivers needed work and could blue screen your box. There was a lot of back and forth on the internet about which driver version to load to get the most stable experience. Fast forward to 2020 and the perception about AMD's video driver quality seems to be in a similar place: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-big-navi-d…

Not had a single crash on the Linux open source drivers though, here my RX 550 is rock solid with excellent performance for the given hardware. We have two different Vulkan drivers and two different shader compilers to choose from, all open source.

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#139

Post by Tuna-Fish » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #101

PedroBatista wrote: post #6

Rumor has it AMD has a competitive GPU but will not pursue the high-end market mostly because of their limited TSMC slots, they can make much more money from a CPU wafer than a GPU one ( due to area size and yield ) But I really hope I'm wrong and they kick Nvidia ass since they become such intolerable arrogant anti-competitive pricks in the last +10 years.

If you don't mind, I have what is probably a dumb question. Why does a GPU use PCI-Express still? I understand why they used to use it, but now they are not only standard, but in some cases the most important part of a PC. I feel like if we could break the basic components out of the card, and bring it closer the system with a more modular design a bunch of things would be better. Wouldn't it be nice if I could choos…

> Wouldn't it be nice if I could choose more CUDA cores if that's what I needed? Wouldn't it be nice if I could add more dedicated video RAM?

How would you achieve any of that? The single meaningful difference between data rates in normal DDR memory and GDDR is that the latter is designed for signaling where the chips are soldered directly on a pcb with very short traces, whereas the former is designed to accommodate the longer distances and narrower buses necessitated by having socket connections.

Any hypothetical new GPU connector would still have to have the memory soldered on the same board as the GPU. (Or, if you are going for the more advanced packaging methods, connected through an interposer or EMIB or something.)

> Why does a GPU use PCI-Express still?

Because PCI-Express is basically the best anyone can do. It has been rapidly evolved to the point where in the past there was a lot of win by using custom busses, but now everyone just uses PCIe because it's the best available. (And I mean everyone, almost all of the remaining custom buses used in high-performance workloads are basically PCIe with a few restrictions loosened.)

Basically the only way you can go up from PCIe is to go wider. And if you do that, what you will likely to do is to make a LGA or PGA style socket format, that talks PCIe.

Re: AMD Announces Ryzen “Zen 3” and Radeon “RDNA2” Presentations for October

#140

Post by d0mdo0ss » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

deeeeeplearning wrote: post #115

the_duke wrote: post #2

With Intel stuck in process hell for a while longer, I primarily hope AMD can gain ground on Nvidia. They are pushing a lot of innovation and gaining market dominance, both in the ML/GPGPU space and gaming (with ray tracing, upscaling, etc). We need some competition to keep prices low and innovation high medium to long term.

>gaining market dominance, both in the ML/GPGPU space Is this really the case? Last I checked all the major Deep Learning toolsets ran off CUDA/cuDNN and there was nothing comparable for AMD hardware.

anyone have some experience on this? I'm in the market for an AMD laptop capable of running standard sci-kit/pytorch/etc but these seem optimized for NVIDIA cards. I'm curious about the outlook for these trending AMD cards.