Vega 7's clockspeed increased by 16.4%. - That means the Render Output Pipelines (A big limiter on Vega), Texture Mapping Units operate that much faster. - The ROPS is a big one as AMD always seems to be ROP starved.

Compute increased by 9.5% over Vega 64.

Bandwidth increased by a whopping 112.27%.

The 25% or so increases is more or less from increases in clockrate and that bandwidth boost... Vega was never compute bound to begin with.

So yes, seriously. Vega 7 is just like RX 590, few enhancements... Bulk of the gains due to clock increases thanks to the smaller fabrication process opening up extra headroom.

Is there some secret sauce hidden somewhere? Possibly, but we don't know at this point in time... And it is best to leave such speculation until Anandtech has done a thorough analysis on the hardware when it releases.

They still marketed it to Gamers. - AMD has a different brand for non-gamers... You might have heard of them under the banner of "Fire Pro".

AMD could have also done what they initially did with Vega... And called it the "Frontiers Edition" - Which WAS marketed towards gamers+professionals.

Drawing comparisons to Titan is a bit silly, they both have vastly different price points and targeted audiences... I mean. The Titan is actually a good card for professionals, gamers and prosumers.

AMD can't just be "on par" with the RTX 2080.

The issue is... By the time the Vega 7 launches, the RTX 2080 may have dropped a notch on the pricing ladder.
...Plus the RTX 2080 isn't even nVidia's fastest GPU, the RTX 2080 Ti and Titan sit above it, let alone what Pascal offers.

The Geforce RTX 2080 not only gets essentially "Free" Ray Tracing and DLSS... But does everything whilst consuming less power... For the gamer, there is little value in what Vega 7 offers... And this is coming from someone who generally only buys AMD GPU's.

AMD has always offered GPU's with surprising amounts of compute... Hence why they were gobbled up left, right and center by crypto currency miners. - But games generally need more than that. - Vega 7 should do well in those markets that are looking for more compute.

What AMD really needs to do is ditch Graphics Core Next and move onto Next-Gen already.

I don't actually like nVidia's approach to Ray Tracing. - Ray Tracing is generally a compute and memory constrained issue, so nVidia has taken what seems to be a fixed-function route which is efficient from a transistor point of view with the amount of performance it offers, but it also means those units cannot be leveraged for general rasterization tasks... And lets face it, we still live in a rasterization world.

Hopefully AMD takes another approach to Ray Tracing.

It smells like the Geforce FX all of again.... Lots of fixed function stuff at the expense of other hardware... And the irony was... It is the perfect Storm for AMD to pull another Radeon 9700 Pro all over again.
However... Despite nVidia essentially crippling itself, AMD still cannot get a decisive victory even at 7nm, it's a testament to how efficient nVidia's GPU's are right now, AMD is years away from even matching them.

This is exactly my sentiment as well - instead of kicking nVidia in the nuts right now with a GPU that has massive fps advantage in current titles over their RTX offerings, AMD is coming out with something that is around 2080 level with higher TDP and on smaller node.

I'm really glad that Ryzen finally brought them back into CPU game, but it seems they just can't get their shit together when it comes to GPUs.

And I argued the same thing.  There are differences, though.  Ryzen launched only a few months before the X did.  No way would they have a CPU of that quality just months after it launched itself.  Like you said, the cost would have been crazy.  Forget $499, it would have been the PS3's $599 all over again.  I'm sure it would have also taken more effort from MS, making sure that every game ran correctly on a new CPU with a different architecture.

Radeon VII, on the other hand, launches next month.  That's 1 1/2 years, seeing as XB2 isn't expected until late 2020, to get costs down.  I'm guessing if it did use it, it would also be a slightly parred down version of it.  I could definitely see this being used in the top of the line XB2, while the PS5 gets Navi, which Sony is rumored to be having input in its development.

Not only because it's cheaper. I guess both Sony and Microsoft doesn't really want to work with Nvidia at this point. Nvidia screwed both companies in the past. They screwed Microsoft with GPU prices for original Xbox which led to a lawsuit. And they made the worse GPU for PS3 than what was inside Xbox360 which came out a year before. I guess it costed more for Sony than X360 GPU as well.

The same. This is the exact same reason I stopped buying Nvidia GPUs 6 years ago. I just don't feel like supporting such business practices.

The price difference won't be the same as in retail. Not to say that the console GPUs will only be based on desktop counterparts, not be the exact same thing. Console manufacturers never pay retail prices for their chips. Otherwise we would never have seen a 400-500$ consoles. I also hope Microsoft won't go with Radeon VII for Scarlett. Choosing Navi even if it will be slightly less powerful would be a wiser choice as this GPU will have more new technologies that won't be present in Radeon VII

It will be interesting to see if Nintendo has the same problems with Nvidia that the other two did.  On one hand, they may not want to screw up their last chance to stay in the console market, so will treat Nintendo well.  On the other hand, which the way the CEO talks make me think it may go this way, they know they have Nintendo by the balls for a mobile chip suitable for them, so may refuse to negotiate much lower prices.  This could affect Nintendo's ability to price cut when needed.

As for Navi, I have a feeling MS may not have access to it.  Sony is rumored to be working pretty closely with AMD on Navi.  I kinda doubt they would want all of their input to go into their competition's machine.  I would imagine Sony is going to have console exclusivity on Navi, at least for the beginning of the gen.  I think Radeon VII, most likely customized, is the way MS is going to go.  We have over a year for them to drop prices, which, like you pointed out, aren't the prices MS pays, anyway.  It would give them a numbers win, most likely, in terms of Tflops.  Of course, it won't be that large of a win, will cause it to be ~$499 vs a ~$399 PS5, and have fewer of the new technologies found in Navi.  In the end, MS is going to make sure they can tout the most powerful system next gen, but I think it will mainly be on paper.  Sony's 1st parties are going to show just what next gen can do.

I would bet anything that RX 3000 rumor is bollocks. It isn't going to nearly double 7 nm Vega in  efficiency. AMD would be shouting to the market with years to spare if they had anything good; Zen was less impressive than that and that's what happened. Navi is just another GCN architecture. Thus, it's shit at this day and age. The best thing you can expect from shit is a pretty morning mushroom to sprout from it, and nothing more. Otherwise, it's just another step in RTG's staircase of disappointment.

Different price point, certainly, targeted audiences, not so sure. Sure, they just showed only gaming benchmarks, but I wouldn't have done any different - don't want to steal the thunder of the just newly released Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 which are much more expensive.

Titan was good for professionals and prosumers, very good even. RTX Titan both cut that down and locked it behind the driver, making it in practice a pure gaming card. You want to work with that? Buy a Quadro RTX 6000 or 8000; same chip but with drivers unlocked to actually be able to work with it. And if you need FP64, still better to get the predecessors as this gen it got radically cut down even in the Quadro line.

Btw, FirePro are pure server cards by now (since 2017 and Polaris), you might have meant their workstation successors, the Radeon Pro series.

You know what's really salty? According to Wikipedia and the couple of sources on there, they are close relatives. Apparently, Su's grandfather and Haung's mother are brother and sister. I wouldn't want to be there for their next family get together.

This technical mumbo-jumbo is interesting.

Ryzen was taped out long before the Xbox One X even released... CPU's take years to design, test and ratify.
Microsoft would have been able to leverage Ryzen if they so wanted as the design was well and truly done and dusted, they just didn't.

I hope neither console uses Navi or Vega. - That isn't next generation graphics.

They do have access to it.
Navi is Graphics Core Next, just another iterative update to the core architecture, it's nothing revolutionary.

It is also an AMD technology, not a Sony one... All Sony will be doing is presenting AMD with design goals of what they would like out of a part... Then AMD's semi-custom division will get to work trying to meet those goals.

Navi is Graphics Core Next. An AMD technology, patented by AMD. - Sony doesn't really have any say in the matter.
If you think Sony is having transistor-level input on the layout of Navi, then you are highly mistaken.

It won't double 7nm Vega, Navi is a replacement for Polaris not Vega. - What it will do is bring Vega 64 (14nm) to essentially a 150w TDP, Vega 7 will still be 25-40% faster.

Vega is actually efficient... At lower voltages and clockrates, AMD just decided to throw efficiency out the Window and dial everything to the max, otherwise they would risk having Vega 7 running against the Geforce 2070 rather than the 2080... And that isn't going to sit well when you have 16GB of stupidly expensive HBM memory.

Same reason why they ported the Radeon RX 480 to 12nm with the Radeon RX 590, they took the clockrate headroom when moving from 14nm to 12nm (And because they are similar processes, actually easy to do!), dialed the voltages up to get as much performance as possible without any regard to power consumption.

Keep in mind they are the same GPU. Vega 7's TDP is certainly real-world and comparable to Vega 64.

Vega 7 wasn't built specifically for 7nm remember, Vega's successor will... And that means the chip layout will be better optimized for the 7nm process.

Another thing to keep in mind is that nVidia, AMD and Intel and all the other chip manufacturers actually calculate TDP differently, so none are directly comparable.

The RX 480 wasn't much of an upgrade over the R9 390X though. But it did use significantly less power.
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1746?vs=1748

In short, the improvements that Polaris had over Volcanic Islands was pretty inconsequential on the performance front.

As for cooling... Microsoft has it's shit sorted on that front, they learned a lesson from the Xbox 360 I think... Hence why the Xbox One, Xbox One S and Xbox One X are all fairly whisper quiet and reliable.

The point I am making is that... If you showcase a brand new shiny GPU... With gaming benchmarks... Then you are marketing your GPU to gamers. It really is as simple as that...
And if your GPU doesn't measure up to the competition, then you bring ridicule and condemnation upon yourself... And you really have no one else to blame but yourself.