AMD's Raja Koduri Takes Q4 Off, Lisa Su Takes The RTG Helm

[Guest]

Raja Koduri, AMD's senior vice president and chief architect of the AMD Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), has announced that he is taking leave for through the fourth quarter of this year.

AMD's Raja Koduri Takes Q4 Off, Lisa Su Takes The RTG Helm : Read more

 

[photon123]

Whoever is responsible for the Vega disaster should be fired.

 

[hannibal]

Someone making those fansy HBM memories... good Luck trying to get that happen.
The realese was not what it should have been, but some things were out of AMDs hands. It was not possible to turn back to gddr5 after the product was planned. Interesting to see next amd gpu. Is it still HBM or not. Most likely it is because the product is quite ready in anyway. Hopefully the HBM suply is better next time, or the gpu situation is not getting any better to the customers.

 

[redgarl]

The Vega 56 is an excellent card Photon123. If you are playing games, 70W more or less doesn't matter.

 

[JamesSneed]

Whoever is responsible for the Vega disaster should be fired.

I disagree AMD put very little money into it(Admitted to already by Lisa). They put there weight behind the Zen cores for Ryzen, Threadripper and EPYC. If Navi is a bust as well then I'm with you until then I really think it's just a matter of what they chose to spend money on and Vega wasn't the focus.

 

[falchard]

I'll be honest. For the Chief Architect to take a couple months off before moving into the next set of product development is always a good idea. It resets yourself and allows you to enter the development with a clear mind. This wind down period helps mature ones skills and grow in their position. A lot of development type companies do this as their staff is usually committed through the entire product development cycle.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

Part of me wants to accuse him of hiding from the fallout over pricing/availability/performance until the holidays are over.

 

[JonDol]

I still fail to understand why this people's holiday is hardware news...

 

[artk2219]

Part of me wants to accuse him of hiding from the fallout over pricing/availability/performance until the holidays are over.

I honestly dont think there's anything to hide about, its selling well, and they have a few major design wins, especially with the new iMacs. They over promised in their marketing sure, but its not the unmitigated disaster everyone makes it out to be. Its competitive with the cards that it is targeting, and it can be an efficient architecture when its not chasing absolute performance as seen in the reviews below. That being said, it was late, and they need to work on a process and architecture refresh to help its high end power and heat issues (like they did for the 4870 to create the 4890). But its nowhere near the problem that it was with the GTX 480 when it was released, in case some of you have short memories (Holy cow I forgot the average noise and power levels that we used to put up with). All in all, there is definitely promise in Vega.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-rx-vega-56,5202-21.html
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3020-amd-rx-vega-56-review-undervoltage-hbm-vs-core
https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hardwareluxx.de%2Findex.php%2Fartikel%2Fhardware%2Fgrafikkarten%2F44084-amd-radeon-rx-vega-56-und-vega-64-im-undervolting-test.html&edit-text=

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-480,2585-15.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvidia-s-geforce-gtx-480-and-gtx-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/19

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

Part of me wants to accuse him of hiding from the fallout over pricing/availability/performance until the holidays are over.

I honestly dont think there's anything to hide about, its selling well, and they have a few major design wins, especially with the new iMacs. They over promised in their marketing sure, but its not the unmitigated disaster everyone makes it out to be. Its competitive with the cards that it is targeting, and it can be an efficient architecture when its not chasing absolute performance as seen in the reviews below. That being said, it was late, and they need to work on a process and architecture refresh to help its high end power and heat issues (like they did for the 4870 to create the 4890). But its nowhere near the problem that it was with the GTX 480 when it was released, in case some of you have short memories (Holy cow I forgot the average noise and power levels that we used to put up with). All in all, there is definitely promise in Vega.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-rx-vega-56,5202-21.html
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3020-amd-rx-vega-56-review-undervoltage-hbm-vs-core
https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hardwareluxx.de%2Findex.php%2Fartikel%2Fhardware%2Fgrafikkarten%2F44084-amd-radeon-rx-vega-56-und-vega-64-im-undervolting-test.html&edit-text=

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-480,2585-15.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvidia-s-geforce-gtx-480-and-gtx-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/19

Was referring more to the availability, pricing, and bundles. You can apportion blame however you want between retailers and miners and so forth, but for the typical consumer all they know is that the card was advertised at a given price, and practically none were to be had at that price. But, if you're willing to pay $100-200 more for a bundled card, you can get the card and couple free games, or coupons to make your Ryzen or Mobo or Freesync Monitor cheaper. Otherwise it's just the massively (up to 50%) marked up stand alone cards.

Then there's the speculation that AMD could be losing money on each card sold. Fudzilla was estimating about $100 loss for every Vega 64 sold:

http://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/44401-amd-is-losing-100-on-every-vega

Gamersnexus estimated the cost of just the 8 GB HBM2 memory and interposer at $175. Most of the components of Vega 56 are the same as Vega 64, so the margins on the cheaper 56 are likely worse.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3032-vega-56-cost-of-hbm2-and-necessity-to-use-it

Either way, it doesn't look like AMD can make much by way of profits with consumer Vega, and if the goal was to grab marketshare for Ryzen and Freesync, they have to keep the cards out of the hands of miners. Since they released a mining-specific patch less than a week after release, it really looks like they've resorted to the pricy bundles in order to recoup costs, and are relying on miners to buy those bundles.

 

[heviink]

I will be buying 56 once third party products are out (assuming availability is good) as an upgrade to my R9-290. While many of us were hoping that Vega would be a great challenge in the 1080ti bracket, the truth is that I was not going to spend in the 1080ti bracket anyway. Vega is more than enough for me for gaming at 1080p, and if the R9 was anything to go by it will actually hold its ability longer in tomorrow's games than the currently comparable 1060/70.

 

[artk2219]

Part of me wants to accuse him of hiding from the fallout over pricing/availability/performance until the holidays are over.

I honestly dont think there's anything to hide about, its selling well, and they have a few major design wins, especially with the new iMacs. They over promised in their marketing sure, but its not the unmitigated disaster everyone makes it out to be. Its competitive with the cards that it is targeting, and it can be an efficient architecture when its not chasing absolute performance as seen in the reviews below. That being said, it was late, and they need to work on a process and architecture refresh to help its high end power and heat issues (like they did for the 4870 to create the 4890). But its nowhere near the problem that it was with the GTX 480 when it was released, in case some of you have short memories (Holy cow I forgot the average noise and power levels that we used to put up with). All in all, there is definitely promise in Vega.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-rx-vega-56,5202-21.html
https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3020-amd-rx-vega-56-review-undervoltage-hbm-vs-core
https://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hardwareluxx.de%2Findex.php%2Fartikel%2Fhardware%2Fgrafikkarten%2F44084-amd-radeon-rx-vega-56-und-vega-64-im-undervolting-test.html&edit-text=

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-480,2585-15.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvidia-s-geforce-gtx-480-and-gtx-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/19

Was referring more to the availability, pricing, and bundles. You can apportion blame however you want between retailers and miners and so forth, but for the typical consumer all they know is that the card was advertised at a given price, and practically none were to be had at that price. But, if you're willing to pay $100-200 more for a bundled card, you can get the card and couple free games, or coupons to make your Ryzen or Mobo or Freesync Monitor cheaper. Otherwise it's just the massively (up to 50%) marked up stand alone cards.

Then there's the speculation that AMD could be losing money on each card sold. Fudzilla was estimating about $100 loss for every Vega 64 sold:

http://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/44401-amd-is-losing-100-on-every-vega

Gamersnexus estimated the cost of just the 8 GB HBM2 memory and interposer at $175. Most of the components of Vega 56 are the same as Vega 64, so the margins on the cheaper 56 are likely worse.

https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3032-vega-56-cost-of-hbm2-and-necessity-to-use-it

Either way, it doesn't look like AMD can make much by way of profits with consumer Vega, and if the goal was to grab marketshare for Ryzen and Freesync, they have to keep the cards out of the hands of miners. Since they released a mining-specific patch less than a week after release, it really looks like they've resorted to the pricy bundles in order to recoup costs, and are relying on miners to buy those bundles.

Ah yep and in this I would agree, the launch hasn't exactly been executed well and the retailers are definitely being price gouging jerks. The BOM and assembly cost should come down as production increases, but I'm not sure if they will ever really make any money on Vega. It could be a market grab, but its still in the wrong market currently, and when mining crashes, the new market will definitely suffer with all of the used cards hitting the market hard (but yay for consumers). The other benefit is the ramp up on HBM2 which will definitely be used in the future on more products as prices come down, and at least they will have some of the R&D costs paid off this way, as opposed to having it all just be a sunk cost.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

I think you're right about HBM2. Several sites have concluded that the GCN architecture is desperate for memory bandwidth, along with the reduced power consumption. In a way it reminds me of Intel's Mesh interconnect. It may not be providing much of an improvement over their Ring architecture in the first generation of products, and is actually slower in some cases. But looking forward, they didn't have a choice. At some point you have to bite the bullet and make the jump.