The Radeon VII: AMD squeezes its transistors to re-enter high end
New 7nm GPU falls short in price/performance
New 7nm GPU falls short in price/performance
AMD has released its latest Vega 20 GPU and Radeon AIB implementation the Radeon VII, a 3840 shader (60 Vega compute units) with 16 GB of HBM2 RAM, for $699. The new AIB uses 300 watts which is 40% more than the RTX 2080 and goes a long way towards explaining why it has three fans compared to RTX’s two. … Read more
AMD reported its quarterly results for calendar Q4 2018, revenues and operating income were up year-over-year as well as its graphics and compute groups revenue and profits. “We delivered our second straight year of significant revenue growth, market share gains, expanded gross margin and improved profitability based on our high-performance products. Importantly, we more than doubled our EPYC processor shipments … Read more
Ray tracing, as everyone knows, is a simple algorithm that can totally consume a processor. But how much a given processor is consumed is an unanswerable question because it depends upon the scene and of course the processor itself. So, approximations have to be made, and parameters fixed to get a consistent comparison. Then it’s left to the buyer to … Read more
To celebrate how great the Polaris GPU has been for AMD they are offering a new shrink version with a fantastic deal — a collection of new games. Since it was first announced in 2015, the 14nm “tick” of the Polaris GPU was built in GlobalFoundries’ fab. AMD launched the 14nm RX580 in April 2017 for $229 (8 GB GDDR5). … Read more
Polaris tick-tock plus a game library
Imagination has introduced a new compression scheme for GPUs that it claims provides visually lossless image compression with a guaranteed reduction in memory footprint. The company is offering its new PVRIC4, which is an image compression technology that it says will enable SoC customers targeting devices such as DTVs, smartphones, and tablets to reduce costs without a discernable loss of … Read more
An average improvement of 31% over the previous generation
The highly anticipated Turing GPU-based Nvidia RTC 2080-series AIBs were announced in late August at Gamecon 2018 and the top of the lines cards were promised for delivery in late September. They came out the week of the 17th, and everyone who could get their hands on one tested and compared them to the previous generation, the Pascal GPU-based 1080-series. … Read more
Nvidia, with its claim to be the leading AI training engine in the data center, has painted a big bullseye on their back. Nvidia’s outsize marketing strategy means that everyone who has introduced or shown an AI chip is going to come after Nvidia. Nvidia has raised the bar with their new Turing-based Tesla T4 AIB, and, strangely, is positioning … Read more
Today, we’re more likely to measure the progress of humanity by Blade Runner rather than biblical omens, plagues, locusts, etc. Even though we have plenty of that going on as well. By the Blade Runner scale, we’re hurtling towards the abyss. Japanese communications giant, NTT Docomo showed off a wealth of technology at the International Broadcasters Convention. It always does. … Read more
Quarter-to-quarter graphics board shipments decreased 22% with a 2% INCREASE year-to-year