Asus Rumored to be Crafting Insane Dual-Hawaii Ares III Card

[MTWSD]

Basically, Scrypt ASIC miners might not be economically viable.

when you consider that the miners are causing AMD to lose market share in the PC gaming arena, then it might be in their interest to actually design a card with the unnecessary stuff gutted. Like take a 290x and cut out all the hardware decoding, FP units, and A/V output stuff, then make the memory bus 768 bit wide like the 7990 had and drop in >4GB of GDDR5.The fact that the board will basically be a GPU, memory controller/bus and some ram and pretty much nothing else should offset the cost of development, then do initial production run of ~5k-8k of them and send them to their partners to strap on some cooling (design the card to be compatible with 290x coolers) and price it to where its a better value for the miners than gaming cards.that way gamers can by reasonably priced AMD cards again, circumventing the problem and making even more money. They could make the card in small.batches as demand needs.

 

[vertigo_2000]

I wish people wouldn't be so butthurt over mining, and just be happy for AMD.

I don't think AMD sees any of the inflated price, but they at least are selling out. The 3rd party vendors are making a killing off these though.

 

[InvalidError]

Basically, Scrypt ASIC miners might not be economically viable.

when you consider that the miners are causing AMD to lose market share in the PC gaming arena, then it might be in their interest to actually design a card with the unnecessary stuff gutted.

Making a new set of photo masks to make an R9-290X re-spin specifically for ASIC mining would not be cost-effective for AMD: the R&D, validation and photo masks would cost a few millions up-front, adding over $300 per chip in costs if they only sold ~10k of them.

Most of the cost of making chips (aside from the R&D that goes into the logic design itself) is die size and the die size is ultimately constrained by IO pin count and design size. At 512bits, you are looking at ~700 memory control and data pins and 1500+ power+ground pins for over 2200 total pins, which would be a 49x49 or larger grid (need to leave a few open spots in the grid to make fan-out through the substrate manageable) and with a 0.4mm ball pitch (~60 balls per inch), you would still end up with a die in the neighborhood of 390sqmm just because there are that many balls that need to fit under it, which is only 10% smaller than the stock R9-290X. Almost no savings to be had on the production end of things.

BTW, the main reason why CPUs have IGPs is exactly because of that: integrating the memory controller in the CPU considerably increased the die area required to fit all those extra balls so CPU manufacturers added IGPs and larger caches to do something with that otherwise wasted space.

So, if AMD made mining-specific chips, they would most likely end up significantly more expensive than their regular GPUs due to the unnecessary extra R&D cost that does saves next to nothing on production costs.

BTW, the HD7990 was not a 768bits chip; it was a pair of 384bits (HD7970) chips.

 

[jimmysmitty]

They won't call it the Ares III, a more appropriate name would be the Pluto.

Perhaps, given that they intend to put two R9 290X chips on the same card, a more appropriate name would be Hephaestus, after Greek god of fire and volcanoes (among other things).

Or perhaps Vulcan, the roman equivalent to Hephaestus.If they named this the ASUS Vulcan, how badass would than be? And it is a very easy to remember name that sticks well.Heck, why doesn't AMD name their graphics cards after roman gods? That would be an epic line of graphics card, while the CPUs could be Viking names.

I don't think Spock would be pleased.

I wish people wouldn't be so butthurt over mining, and just be happy for AMD.

Yes the same people who have been buying and supporting AMD should be happy that the miners have cause insane price inflation of their GPUs and should happily pay, at one time, 64% more over the MSRP.

People are upset because now NVidia will price as they want since AMDs pricing is inflated meaning we get less bang for our buck from either company. If the 290X stayed around $550-$600 and drivers continued to improve performance, like it does with all new GPUs, then we could have seen NVidia drop prices then AMD and we would have had better pricing on top end GPUs. I remember when $400 was the price for top end GPUs....

Basically, Scrypt ASIC miners might not be economically viable.

when you consider that the miners are causing AMD to lose market share in the PC gaming arena, then it might be in their interest to actually design a card with the unnecessary stuff gutted.

Making a new set of photo masks to make an R9-290X re-spin specifically for ASIC mining would not be cost-effective for AMD: the R&D, validation and photo masks would cost a few millions up-front, adding over $300 per chip in costs if they only sold ~10k of them.

Most of the cost of making chips (aside from the R&D that goes into the logic design itself) is die size and the die size is ultimately constrained by IO pin count and design size. At 512bits, you are looking at ~700 memory control and data pins and 1500+ power+ground pins for over 2200 total pins, which would be a 49x49 or larger grid (need to leave a few open spots in the grid to make fan-out through the substrate manageable) and with a 0.4mm ball pitch (~60 balls per inch), you would still end up with a die in the neighborhood of 390sqmm just because there are that many balls that need to fit under it, which is only 10% smaller than the stock R9-290X. Almost no savings to be had on the production end of things.

BTW, the main reason why CPUs have IGPs is exactly because of that: integrating the memory controller in the CPU considerably increased the die area required to fit all those extra balls so CPU manufacturers added IGPs and larger caches to do something with that otherwise wasted space.

So, if AMD made mining-specific chips, they would most likely end up significantly more expensive than their regular GPUs due to the unnecessary extra R&D cost that does saves next to nothing on production costs.

BTW, the HD7990 was not a 768bits chip; it was a pair of 384bits (HD7970) chips.

They didn't just add IGPs to make up the wasted space but overall a APU like a i5 or a A10 use way less power than a CPU and discrete GPU.

And I don't think there would be any additional R&D cost to AMD. NVidia still sucks, except Maxwell, for Scrypt mining because their GPUs while similar to their workstation Quadro variants, had specific parts disabled so people would use Quadros instead of the much cheaper desktop variants. AMD could probably easily do the same, problem is that it possibly may affect the GPUs performance if it is designed around that.

That or AMD just likes selling out of GPUs.

 

[ProcrastZkc]

Well Ares is the equivalent of Mars, so it would be logical to name one's AMD cards Ares and Nvidia cards Mars.

 

[ProcrastZkc]

Well Ares is the equivalent of Mars, so it would be logical to name one's AMD cards Ares and Nvidia cards Mars.

 

[denial_]

"Guys, look at my mining farm with 8x290x2!" *Turns on* *Powergrid goes down*While this might work for a tech savvy person, I don't think the average miner should get one. Average US wall socket only manages ~1800w anyway.

Only 1000 Ares was made, and I doubt ASUS would be making more of this one. It's an exclusive item made to show what they can do. Kindda like the Mars serie.On another note, if the rumor is real, I'm curious to see the cooling solution of such a card

 

[InvalidError]

They didn't just add IGPs to make up the wasted space but overall a APU like a i5 or a A10 use way less power than a CPU and discrete GPU.

When Intel started integrating IGPs in their North Bridge chips, the main reason was that die shrinks were making the logic much smaller than the footprint required to fit all the IO pins/balls. When Intel integrated the NB in their CPUs, the IGP followed one generation later for the same reason. The main motivation is generating value out of otherwise wasted space and if that ends up using "way less power" in the process, that is just icing on the cake.

As for AMD crippling GPUs to re-brand them as mining chips, what would the point be in that? If they sell those for cheaper than normal GPUs (why pay more for something artificially crippled?), those will be sold-out and drain the market that way. If AMD made those more expensive or tried to limit supply, miners will simply continue buying normal GPUs. If they tried specifically crippling mining performance, that would likely mess up other stuff and cause more headaches for AMD than it is worth. Gamers are no better off either way.

Since Maxwell looks like a serious mining contender, AMD GPUs may come back to suggested retail prices soon. Now would not be a good time for AMD to arbitrarily cripple their products.

 

[chumly]

is 140C too hot?! lol

 

[Bondfc11]

Ares has to be the dumbest name. Ares yous guys coming to the partay? Really stupid.

Learn to pronounce, man...

Only geektards read that as anything but plural are. You probably use anyways as well.