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AMD can avoid using HBM2 if they are willing to make new architecture that is not GCN based. the problem is AMD insistence on using GCN so their investment in console hardware can directly benefit them on PC. they probably hoping node shrink and HBM can solve the efficiency issue but in the end both can't really help AMD to get what they want. also after thinking for a while i think that massive FP16 performance also leads to much bigger die size on Vega. just look at polaris 10 and GP106. polaris is a bit bigger at 232mm2 vs 200mm2 for GP106. but performance wise they were about on par. then we have Vega at 484mm2. and yet it is only competitive with nvidia GP104 which is 314mm2.
 


Reading the associated article, it seems to imply that AMD is counting on miners buying the game bundled cards in order to make margins.
 
I kind of already gave a little update on some of this information.

The Ethereum Effect: Graphics Card Price Watch (Updated)
by Michael Justin Allen Sexton August 26, 2017 at 11:07 AM
"The recent resurgence of cryptocurrency and the growing popularity of Ethereum has led to a massive shortage in the GPU market. Prices are oscillating wildly, and dozens of graphics card models are sold out. In short, the mining craze is wreaking havoc on the graphics card market. Below, we’ve begun tracking pricing and availability for the volatile graphics card market."
"About Ethereum Mining
Ethereum, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, is largely responsible for the sudden shortage of GPUs. The price of Ethereum has grown slowly over the last couple of years, and it really took off at the beginning of 2017. The price of Ether climbed from roughly $10 in January 2017 to $50 in March. It eventually peaked at close to $400 in June. By July 3, the price of Ether had dropped to $286, and it continued to decline to a low of around $150 on July 16 before beginning to rise again. It sits at $330 as of August 25, and it appears the Ethereum gold rush will continue for some time."
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/

The Price Of Gaming (Or Mining)
"Fortunately for PC enthusiasts, the availability of GPUs has improved significantly since the Ethereum gold rush began. Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 and 1070 GPUs were perpetually sold out throughout June and the early part of July. Some models of these cards remain sold out, but the majority of cards are now available, but at somewhat higher prices. Most GTX 1070s still sit between $400 and $500, whereas the GTX 6GB 1060s range from $250 to $400. These prices are far from ideal, but they're at least lower than they were during June, and they aren't so high as to make them realistically affordable.
It's still quite difficult to find AMD graphics cards, and even when you can, they're always priced far above their MSRP. However, you can now occasionally find AMD GPUs in stock from Amazon and Newegg. The prices on RX 570 and 580 GPUs are still significantly higher than their MSRPs, and most of these cards sit at close to double their suggested retail pricing. As a result, they aren't a particularly wise investment for gamers at this time.
AMD's just-launched Vega 64 GPU has also been affected by the shortage. Since the launch, we have seen Vega 64 GPUs come into stock on Amazon and Newegg, but nearly all of these sold out within minutes. XFX's Vega 64 GPU with a $200 premium on Amazon is the only Vega 64 card we found that stayed in stock for more than a few minutes, and it's included in the list below.
While we wait for the shortage to end, companies continue to bolster their mining product portfolios. EVGA has now joined the likes of Asus, Biostar, Sapphire, and Zotac in developing a GPU targeted specifically at cryptocurrency miners.
We’ve also seen a new mining-focused motherboard from Asrock that can support up to 13 graphics cards. Biostar has a similar board for AM4 CPUs that can support six cards, and although we haven’t seen it yet, MSI also has a mining GPU coming soon, as well as a motherboard designed for mining. Although these may be attractive to cryptocurrency miners, one source told us that they use the same GPU cores as traditional graphics cards and therefore don’t address the underlying supply problem."
A Supply Shortage At Heart
"While investigating the GPU shortage, we were informed by our sources that many OEMs are struggling to receive GPU cores from Nvidia. The sources also pointed out that part of the issue may lie with TSMC, which typically takes orders months in advance and will likely be unable to rush new orders of Nvidia GPUs due to the need to create products for its other customers.
One company also informed us that they do not plan to increase production due to the instability of the market. They are concerned that if they increase production, the market could shift again, leaving them with large stockpiles of GPUs that are no longer in high demand.
EVGA, however, is having an easier time surviving the shortage than other OEMs. It currently offers the least expensive GPU in four categories and has more GPUs in-stock than its competitors. We asked EVGA about the shortage, and were told that the company is not having issues getting GPUs from Nvidia. The company is experiencing extraordinarily high demand for its products, however, so you’ll still see several models of EVGA graphics cards sold out on several retail sites.
Meanwhile, several OEMs, including Asus, Biostar, Sapphire, and Zotac, have announced new mining graphics cards that are tailored for cryptocurrency mining. We have also seen a new motherboard from Asrock that can support up to 13 GPUs for mining. Biostar has a similar board for AM4 CPUs that can support six GPUs. Although we haven’t seen them yet, EVGA and MSI also have mining GPUs coming soon, and MSI will also have a motherboard designed for mining. Although these may be attractive to cryptocurrency miners, one source told us that they use the same GPU cores as traditional graphics cards, and thus don’t address the underlying supply problem."
Soon To End Or Just Getting Started?
"Currently, the big question on everyone’s mind is when the GPU shortage will end. Unfortunately, this isn’t something that can be answered at this time. It seems that some manufacturers of graphics cards expect the craze to continue, as they recently began production of specialized cards designed explicitly for mining cryptocurrency. Some of these cards, however, cannot be used for gaming as they lack display ports. Although they may be able to ease the GPU shortage slightly, they likely won't have a significant impact.
Overall, the shortage will likely continue until interest in mining cryptocurrency declines."

Follow the link below for a list of current video card prices.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ethereum-effect-graphics-card-prices,34928.html
 
Graphics Card Makers Rolling Out Radeon RX Vega 56 Graphics Cards
by Steven Lynch August 28, 2017 at 2:00 PM
"Conclusion
Radeon RX Vega 56 is a close derivative of Vega 64, so its behaviors largely carry over from AMD’s flagship. The company does cut this card’s board power rating by almost 30% through a combination of disabling eight Compute Units, dialing down the GPU’s frequency, and down-clocking its precious HBM2. But it’s ultimately still much more power-hungry, and consequently hotter and louder, than its primary competition, GeForce GTX 1070.
Performance-wise, Radeon RX Vega 56 fares well against the 1070. Even when we compare it to EVGA’s overclocked GeForce GTX 1070 SC Gaming 8GB (there are no Founders Edition cards left to buy), Vega 56 consistently matches or beats it. In the handful of scenarios where AMD is slower, the loss amounts to single-digit percentages. But whereas Vega 64 made a case for 4K gaming at dialed-back detail settings, it’s safer to think of Vega 56 as a solid solution for 2560x1440 displays at maximum quality in the latest games.
Our VR benchmarks are less conclusive. GeForce GTX 1070 is definitely faster than Vega 56 in Chronos and DiRT Rally. It’s technically quicker in Robo Recall as well, though the GeForce also suffers more dropped frames in that game. Serious Sam narrowly favors Vega 56 over GTX 1070, and Arizona Sunshine runs well on both cards."
"There’s no way to be delicate about our environmental measurements, though. Despite a much lower board power than Vega 64, Radeon RX Vega 56 (using its default Balanced power profile) consumes ~220W in our typical gaming workload. You can overclock for nominal performance gains, but power consumption rises much faster, thrashing efficiency. Alternatively, you can drop Vega 56’s power limit, cut consumption dramatically, and retain most of the card’s performance. This just wasn’t an option for AMD’s shipping configuration—the company knew it had to beat GeForce GTX 1070 in the benchmarks, and it sacrificed the FPS/watt sweet-spot we calculated for a victory in the discipline gamers care about most: speed."
"Beyond the tangibles—performance, power, heat, noise, and efficiency—it’s much more difficult to say whether Radeon RX Vega 56 should be your next graphics card. Weeks after its official debut, Vega 64 remains relatively rare. Those cards we do find in stock sell for ~$700—roughly 40% higher than AMD’s purported launch price and well beyond what any gamer should consider paying.
The company won’t comment on shipping quantities, but again, we know AMD would rather sell its expensive GPUs as Vega 64s than 56es. And given a relatively mature manufacturing platform, the company should yield more completely intact Vega 10 processors. At the same time, Radeon RX Vega 56 appears to be better suited for Ethereum mining than AMD's flagship. Then there’s the lower price tag bound to attract enthusiasts on a tighter budget. Taken together, those variables reasonably suggest less immediate availability and greater demand. That’s not a good prognosis for the likelihood of Vega 56 at a $400 price point.
Fortunately for AMD, GeForce GTX 1070 is a much better cryptocurrency mining card than GTX 1080. So, while gamers can still snag 1080s for as little as $510, 1070s are more elusive. The GeForce GTX 1070 SC Gaming 8GB we used for comparison is out of stock on EVGA’s website (it normally sells for $460). Lower-clocked models are available as low as $430; they’re just not as fast.
In the end, Radeon RX Vega 56’s appeal is a matter of relative comparisons. The preceding 23 pages painted a pretty clear picture of Vega 56’s position against Vega 64, several GeForce cards, and prior-generation Radeons from several different angles. The last one—value—is subject to change on any given day. At $400, we’re willing to overlook higher power consumption and, to a certain extent, more noise than a $460, or even a $430 GeForce GTX 1070, particularly when the Vega 56 is as fast or faster. But if at some point in the future you end up with both cards in your shopping cart and are unsure which way to go, Vega 56 generally wins when it also costs less.
There are still several Vega-specific features that could make this card faster or more capable in the future: Rapid Packed Math, primitive shaders, the Draw Stream Binning Rasterizers, and the HBCC. This is also a youthful product, and there are many examples of AMD’s driver team extracting more performance from new hardware over the course of months. Our Doom, The Division, and Warhammer benchmarks should be evidence of Vega’s potential. But until we see some of those forward-looking features exposed for gamers to enjoy, Vega 56’s success will largely depend on its price relative to GeForce GTX 1070."
VERDICT
"Radeon RX Vega 56 has the potential to be a GeForce GTX 1070 killer if AMD can make enough of them to hit its pricing target. Although the card uses a lot of power, kicks out quite a bit of heat, and makes more noise than the competition under load, performance-oriented enthusiasts will like the way it stacks up in our 1440p benchmarks."
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-rx-vega-56,5202-6.html
 
Graphics Card Makers Rolling Out Radeon RX Vega 56 Graphics Cards
by Steven Lynch August 28, 2017 at 2:00 PM
"First of all, let’s talk about what these cards from Asus, XFX, Sapphire, and Gigabyte have in common. All Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics cards feature the Vega 10 GPU, which is manufactured using a 14nm FinFET LPP process and is made up of close to 12.5 billion transistors. It's equipped with four Asynchronous Compute units, four next-gen Geometry units, 56 next-gen compute units, and 3,584 stream processors. This GPU also sports 224 texture units and 4MB of L2 cache, and it employs 8GB of HBM2 memory.
All the Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics cards mentioned here have a core clock speed of 1,156MHz and a boost clock speed of 1,471MHz. It should go without saying that we will no doubt see overclocked versions of this graphics card from various vendors in the future.
Radeon RX Vega 56 series cards also support bridgeless CrossFire for when you want to use more than one GPU simultaneously. They support AMD FreeSync Technology that eliminates image tears and choppiness, as well as AMD Eyefinity for a panoramic multi-screen gaming experience on up to four monitors.
The RX Vega 56 cards from Sapphire, XFX, and Gigabyte are reference cards equipped with a rear exhaust design utilizing a rear-blower fan mated to a red and black plastic fan shroud. The heatsink features a large direct contact copper vapor chamber with aluminum fins bonded to the surface that absorb the heat energy and are in turn cooled by the blower-style fan.
Asus has distinguished its RX Vega 56 by offering a non-reference design cooler. This card features a large custom-designed heatpipe heatsink that, according to the company, provides 40% more surface area compared to its previous dual-slot design. Asus also included three of its patented “wing-blade” fans and RGB lighting features to boot.
As of this writing, availability and pricing are not available. Depending on demand and availability, we would assume that most of the reference design cards listed above will have an MSRP close to the $400. Graphics cards with custom cooling solutions will no doubt command a higher price. It’s too early to tell what kind of effect Ethereum mining will have on pricing and availability. "

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-radeon-rx-vega-56,35331.html
 
AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 makes $100 loss at MSRP, says report
by Mark Tyson on 30 August 2017, 14:31
"The AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards for enthusiasts and gamers were launched just over a fortnight ago. Almost immediately after the RX Vega 64 became available there were reports of pricing shenanigans. In particular there was controversy about whether the entry level RX Vega 64 SKU's £449 price was merely an introductory special offer or launch pricing. After the initial flurry of sales r/etailers were seen to push prices up by at £100 or more but with 2x 'free games' bundled.

At the end of last week we heard via DigiTimes, that the price problem was merely down to demand, as per classic economics theory. Distributors and retailers were simply selling the new Vega cards for large margins above MSRP because the market tolerated it. Shortages were, according to industry sources, a result of AMD manufacturing partner difficulty in integrating HBM2 with the GPU."
"In a report published by Fudzilla today the plot seems to thicken… According to its industry sources the MSRP set by AMD for the Vega 64 is simply too cheap for it to make any money. Fuzilla's insider says that due to the pricing of HBM2, substrate and chip packaging costs, AMD is losing at least $100 on every MSRP priced Vega 64 sold.

It is explained that AMD plan to lose a limited amount of cash on these initial sales and later work on the manufacturing tech and component prices to lower its costs. Fudzilla says that from October SK hynix will start to deliver HBM2 and the price will become much more favourable. The date ties in with the earlier DigiTimes reports of when extra RX Vega graphics card stock will start to arrive at retailers."

"Looking at Scan today I see that it is actually possible to grab an in-stock Standalone 8GB MSI Radeon RX Vega 64 at £469.99 (see screenshot above). That's the same price as Scan's cheapest RX Vega 56, from Sapphire, which was also in stock at the time of writing.

Vega 56 flashing

If the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 cards were, as MSRPs would suggest, significantly cheaper than their full 4096-core brethren it might be worth fiddling with the BIOS to get extra performance for zero £$£$.

Today VideoCardz reports that a ChipHell forum user was looking at the possibilities of upgrading a Vega 56 into a Vega 64 by modifying the BIOS. Computing history is full of examples of this kind of jiggery-pokery achieving results. However the result noted by 'KDtree' wasn't exactly as expected."
af0231be-7abc-4b26-8b8c-3879146ac312.jpg

"The BIOS mod didn't enable extra cores, but it did succeed in upping the default boost/base GPU clocks to 1545MHz / 945MHz respectively. In some simple user tests the revamped Vega 56 was just two per cent slower than a stock Vega 64. These are interesting results, and said to be achievable following a "simple mod". With RX Vega series cards having two BIOSes there is said to be little risk of bricking the card - but accidents happen so be extremely careful if you tinker."

http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/109544-amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-makes-100-loss-msrp-says-report/
 


I died with this one: "Klingons do not "release" software. Klingon software escapes, leaving a bloody trail of design engineers and quality assurance people in its path."

Thanks for the link; I shared it with the mates over here and we're LOL'ing hard.

Cheers!

EDIT: That is a lot of money AMD is losing there. Sad to know that, but it's their own fault.
 
Exclusive: AMD’s RX Vega 64 Etherium Mining Power Efficiency – 43.5 MH/s At ~248 Watts of Power Draw [Updated]
By Usman Pirzada
19 hours ago
Update: We were able to achieve a power efficiency of 0.20 mHash per watt (40 mHash/s on a power draw of 192 watts), making the RX Vega 64 the most power efficient card on the planet and overtaking the GTX 1070. Since the theoretical limit with the Vega 64 is 72 mHash /s (bandwidth available divided by memory size) we can safely say that with custom mining code you should be able to push this further as well.
Click to expand...

 
AMD|Posted 6 hours ago
AMD Vega is now so good for crypto-mining it'll probably be sold out forever
By
Jacob Ridley
The AMD RX Vega was initially expected to be the chosen one when it came to GPU cryptocurrency mining. Rumours of 70 - 100MH/s compute power were enough to get avid miners ready to jump on the Vega bandwagon. Unfortunately, when Vega launched, numbers weren’t as high as expected. Hash rates were especially low in comparison to Vega’s massive power draw.

If you’re feeling lucky these are the best graphics cards you can actually buy.

As a result, miners turned back to the old favourites of AMD’s polaris-based GPUs rather than attempt a Vega-based mining rig. For gamers, this meant miners weren’t snapping up all their brand-new cards as expected. Fantastic! Finally, a GPU with no availability issues… actually, never mind. Goddamn price hikes.

Well, all is not lost for Vega’s mining potential, much to the chagrin of gamers everywhere. A Reddit post made by S1L3N7_D3A7H claims to be hitting 43.5MH/s on RX Vega 64 Ethereum mining, while only running at 130W total power draw. This puts the card well into the golden range of hash rate/power draw ratio that miners crave for profitability of their rigs. AMD’s polaris-based RX 480, a popular choice for gamers and miners, manages a hash rate of around 25MH/s, however the initial costs are much lower.
The results that this Reddit user found have not yet been replicated, with similar setups only managing the 43.5MH/s hash rate at a much higher power draw. With more accurate electrical monitoring equipment, 130W may prove to be a little out of reach. Still, the numbers are looking up for Vega’s mining prowess. Once these cards gather some speed in the mining community, miners will be looking to capitalise on their earnings with the sort of custom BIOSes that push the card to their absolute maximum for mining potential.

RX Vega 56 is looking likely to also deliver a similar mining performance, and with that in mind, if you were looking to pick up the latest AMD Vega-based card, you best get moving quick. RX Vega 56 is potentially going to offer an even better price/performance ratio for cryptocurrency mining, and that’s bad news for gamers.

Unfortunately, it’s not looking like the plague of shortages hitting graphics cards will let up anytime soon, with price increases for GDDR5 memory also expected to hit costs for graphics cards at retail later in the year.

Raja Koduri, head of AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, has been defending the Vega product launch on Twitter recently. In doing so, he let slip that the Infinity Fabric within Vega is optimised for server usage, and that consumer-optimised versions of this tech will launch in the future. Vega seems to be less and less aimed at gamers as time goes on, and miners are certainly a cash cow that AMD will want to tap into.
Click to expand...

Edit: I seen this and thought I would pass it along. AMD = Advanced Mining Division
 


This part leads me to believe that this is something from when Vega Pro was launched as opposed to recent.
 


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Infinity fabric on Vega is optimized for server. It's a very scalable fabric and you will see consumer optimized versions of it in future.
7:22 AM - 30 Aug 2017
 


We can only hope it drops out to nothing with Vega Cards being efficient! Then watching the rebound of prices in the video card market hit all time lowes!
 


That is odd. So basically the Vega refresh, Vega 11 or Navi will have a better version for consumers.

From the CPU's we know that IF scales with RAM speed and Vega's HBM 2 has superior throughput but the speed itself is low. I wonder what the effect of doing a max OC on the HBM2 would have on overall performance.
 


From the vids I've seen on overclocking Vega- boosting the HBM increases performance more than clockspeed. It's definitely the bottleneck for the card.

If you downclock Vega to the same speed as Fiji then the two cards offer similar perf / w (vega often a bit ahead). However when you clock Vega as far as it will go the performance doesn't scale with it- it's either lack of memory bandwidth or IF that is limiting it as the clock scaling just isn't there. That is why Vega looks so horrible from an efficiency perspective, down clocking the card saves a lot of power for minimal performance loss.
 
I guess we now know where all the HBM2 went... If you were a fab, would you rather sell to AMD or Google?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tpu-v2-google-machine-learning,35370.html
Paul Alcorn said:
The Cloud TPU uses a more traditional design that consists of four ASICs on a single motherboard with a hefty 64GB of HBM that provides 2,400 GBps of memory bandwidth. The combination powers up to 180 TFLOPS per board—but Google has larger ambitions.
...
The company deploys 64 Cloud TPUs into a single "pod" that generates up to 11.5 petaFLOPS of compute and wields 4 TB of HBM. Google hasn't disclosed how many pods are currently active, but it has posted pictures of three deployments. If you wonder why HBM is in short supply, the Cloud TPUs might be part of the answer.
Click to expand...

A picture of 64 TPU pods from the article: (I can't use spoiler tags for this image because, for some reason, they make the image not display, sorry.)
aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLmJlc3RvZm1pY3JvLmNvbS9NL1IvNzA4NDM1L29yaWdpbmFsLzIwMDMuSlBH
 


i read some old article before that HBM maker (including Hynix) did not expect most of their sales coming from AMD. and i think recently there are talks about some company willing to pay few times more than the initial pricing of HBM as long as they get the part for themselves. if that's the case then AMD will not going to win the supply war.
 


Yeah seems odd. I would with almost certainty bet that AMD has a contract in place with Hynix so it likely does not matter.
 
So, to those in the know, are third parties going to produce their own aftermarket versions with custom cooling and overclocking like most graphics cards have? In looking around there seem to just be the reference design (with third party logos?) at $200+ the price that AMD suggested. If so, do we know when this is expected?

Also, anyone care to speculate as to when the cards will get back down to their suggested price? Thanks.
 
Give it a bit more time, since given how hard it seems to get a custom HSF on top of the MCM package, I'm pretty damn sure they're having issues with it.

Plus, Vega turned out to be a very problematic GPU to cool, since they forced more performance out of a design that wasn't (my suspicion) meant to be run at those clocks originally.

Hell, I'm not even sure the aftermarket options that might arrive will improve the situation that much either.

Cheers!
 
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