The immaturity of the great PC vs. PlayStation/Xbox debate

[vivster]

Bofferbrauer said:

vivster said:

Bofferbrauer said:

 

AMD is very sub par, but I wouldn't call it crap. Intel is miles ahead in CPUs and NVidia has the better GPUs right now, but these things can change.

The first preview of Polaris made NVidias current Maxwell chips look like gas guzzlers. Zen has the potential to close the gap to Intel and make AMD CPUs competitiive again. It may not be enough to beat Intel, but catching up after having got such huge arrears in technology, performance and efficiency is no small feat.

I wouldn't give too much on these "previews".

Of course Polaris looks good in comparison to Maxwell. It's a shrink, that's why it's more efficient. But Pascal is right around the corner and will put anything that Polaris does into shame.

It's always the same cycle. People get excited over new architectures from AMD until they realize that they are only able to barely catch up to the standard that Intel and Nvidia have been setting for years.

It's much more than just a shrink, it is a very extensive redesign of the architecture, too. I'm not sure if Pascal will do better, we'll have to see what comes I guess

AMD did set up quite some standards and beat both Intel and NVidia during their history. Remember Thermi Fermi? GeForce FX? AMDs original Athlon (Thunderbird), Athlon XP, Athlon 64? Granted, it's been a while now, but saying they can't beat them is just wrong.

Let's just say that Intel and Nvidia built a certain pedigree. AMD had some good times but they were not able to build on that. There is simply no chance for AMD to ever catch intel since they're miles ahead in research. I have no doubt in my mind that the Zen flagship won't even touch any i7.

Polaris might be very efficient compared to Maxwell but it won't be compared to Pascal. The main drivers of efficiancy will be the shrink and HBM2 which are not in Maxwell but will be in Pascal so any comparisons there are useless. I believe that the efficiency of Polaris is bought by low clock and shader count for mid and low end cards and will be void in the flagships where they will crank up the clock and will go back to being big guzzlers, much like it's the case highly overclocked Maxwells which have the most efficient architecture on 28nm.

What I'm saying is that AMD is trailing too far behind to catch up within just one generation while Intel and Nvidia had years to perfect their already great technology with research budgets AMD could only dream of.