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[Bofferbrauer2]

JEMC said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

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.

When I said that AMD can't work on two architectures at the same time, I was tlaking about the GPU side, not the whole company. Simply put, working on Fiji and now Vega is part of the reasons why AMD has to rebrand their cards so much nowadays. Without those extra chips to worry about, and while still being limited by the current node, AMD could refine and optimize their main architecture more, launching products that aren't just the old one with a new sticky, but actual revisions that justify the new name.

And if they have to completely leave the high-end market to do it, then so be it. After all, it's been quite a while since they had something that could actually compete with Nvidia.

But well, you're agreeing with me that they're not big enough anymore, so they should start realizing that and act accordingly.

That was until Vega, since then the resources that were bound for the development of a brand new CPU architecture are now freed up and used in the development of Navi and after that a GCN successor.

Also, with the continuing success of Ryzen and Epyc, AMD has been hiring again, which should help maintain both divisions at the same speed.

Regarding Krzanich, had he been able to keep it in his pants he wouldn't have been fired. As for who will take over, they only need someone that doesn't screw things up. Intel got Raja to try again to make a proper GPU, and got Keller to develop the next CPUs, so unless the new CEO is stupid and tries to reinvent the wheel, they should be "fine".

Keller only came in April and thus probably is working on the next architecture after Tiger Lake. While with him it's probably going to end up great, it's still many years away. Don't forget he joined AMD in 2012 to design Zen, a full 5 years before it's release. Until then, AMD can wreak some havok among Intel's plans