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[Bofferbrauer2]

JEMC said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:
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Well the RX 680 would be a refresh of a refresh, as such 15% ain't that bad.

However, really wish Navi would come soon. Probably struggling to get the PC version running as expected. After all, PC games need a monolithic GPU, as they consider a setup like Epyc or Threadripper a Multi-GPU setup. So they possibly had to reconsider late into development and create multiple mask sets instead of just one

I didn't post the new about the Intel CEO because it wasn't "hardware related".

As for the AMD new mobile chips, it doesn't really affects us much as few people here game on a laptop, at least as far as I know. I'm more interested in the new 4-core Ryzen desktop chips.

And regarding the GPUs, maybe AMD should reconsider the way they develop GPUs and go back to a single, scalable architecture, and forget to develop two archs for the mainstream and high-end market. It saddens me to say this, but they seem to lack the resources to do it.

AMD is doing that. The problem was more that they couldn't afford development of both a complete lineup of chips and their masks. As a result AMD had to develop only partly releases, with the gaps getting bigger and bigger over time. They had to reduce in size between 2008-2017, so AMD couldn't develop both a new CPU and a new GPU in parallel at full steam. So after they developed Bulldozer and GCN, they had to choose which one to develop first. Considering GCN was doing well originally but Bulldozer was pretty much the definition of a development fail, it was clear the CPU would come first. Hence why the later GCN developments were mostly pretty small. Vega was the last one where they had all possible ressources bound by the CPU development

Every release after the first gen  (Radeon HD 7xxx) had just some new GPUs, and the rest were rebrands. Second Gen was first Bonaire, followed a couple months later with Hawaii. Third gen was Tonga, followed a year later with Fiji. Fourth Gen, Polaris, had 2 chips at first(RX480/470 and RX 460), followed by a very slow one (RX 550) a year later. Vega only has the high-end chip for now apart from the variants in the APUs.

Polaris had those small chips mostly to get rid of their 1./2. gen entry level chips (Oland, Cape Verde and Bonaire), which went through several generations and rebrandings, especially as mobile chips. Especially Oland (which got similarly developed to get rid of the old Terascale chips in the lineup) really had to go, as it couldn't keep up anymore with the APUs, even when bottlenecked, and even Cape verde was getting too slow for them. Btw, when you put a RX460 against Bonaire and a RX 550 against Cape Verde, you can see that AMD was improving GCN quite a lot - just not enough to keep up with NVidia.

With the resources from the CPU architecture development being freed up since Zen got feature complete in early 2016, Navi certainly did profit from the additional work and will probably either come with a full lineup or with radically different chips in PC and server segments (where they can bring the announced scalability without the problems they would have in a PC), and possibly both.

About Krzanich firing not being hardware related: Well, it marks the beginning of the end of a pretty headless era in CPU development at Intel where almost all CPU talents got fired because they went against Krzanichs idea of improving cost-effectiveness. On the other hand he broadened Intels portfolio so much that they are much less dependent on the CPU market anymore, so if AMD would start trashing Intel badly with Ryzen and Epyc they have something else to fall back upon.