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[JEMC]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

JEMC said:

I won't comment on the CPU side because while Zen looks very good, it wouldn't be the first time that AMD overestimates its processors.

On the GPU side, you fail to mention the 1070 which, at $379 and apparently performing a bit better than Titan X/980Ti, will be the card that many will lose to buy. Unless the Polaris 10 cards are less than $300 (and I don't mean $1 less...), AMD will have a difficult time selling their card to anyone with an HD 7970/ GTX 770 or higher card.

After all, Polaris 10 will only bring a bit more performance than the current R9 290/390 and GTX 970 cards, and those cards can be found on sale at $300 and less.

Surely smaller process and higher yield will help pricing it competitively, while lower power requirement, besides requiring less bulky and less expensive cooling and so helping keeping costs low too, should also help saving a little on total system price, requiring a less powerful and expensive PSU, and also on the user's electricity bill. The typical AMD user will find all this attractive, and if peformances will be greater than the 1070, adding all the other benefits could persuade also "neutral" users, leaving only die-hard NVidia fans preferring the 1070.
About real world performances, let's just hope they won't fall too far behind.

Let's go in parts:

"Surely smaller process and higher yield will help pricing it competitively"

28nm yields are still far better than 14 or 16nm yields, and the manufacturing cost of the new process is higher too. Those two reasons won't help making Polaris cheap, but AMD's pursuit of marketshare will.

"lower power requirement, besides requiring less bulky and less expensive cooling"

The first part of that part is true, but the second part isn't. While power consumption is will be lower, the problem is that the chip itself is smaller than the 28nm parts, and that makes heat a bigger problem. Also, the rumors we have suggest that Polaris 10 will be around 230mm2 and a max TDP of 175W, although the actual product will use less than that (around 150W). If those numbers are true, that would make Polaris 10 similar to the Pitcairn chip in the 7870.

"Surely smaller process and higher yield will help pricing it competitively, while lower power requirement, besides requiring less bulky and less expensive cooling and so helping keeping costs low too, should also help saving a little on total system price, requiring a less powerful and expensive PSU, and also on the user's electricity bill. The typical AMD user will find all this attractive"

The typical AMD user bought the 7970, 290/X and 390/X cards. If the performance is there, people will buy it despite how much power they use. And that's true for both AMD and Nvidia.

"if peformances will be greater than the 1070, adding all the other benefits could persuade also "neutral" users, leaving only die-hard NVidia fans preferring the 1070."

I really, really doubt Polaris 10 will be more powerful than the 1070. The latest "leaked" benchmarks pointed that the big Polaris 10 wouldn't beat the Fury X, while the GTX 1070 would be a bit faster than not only the 980Ti, but the Titan X too. And Nvidia has confirmed that the GTX 1070 has a TDP of 150W.

"About real world performances, let's just hope they won't fall too far behind."

That's what we all want to see, and the sooner we get them, the better.