Nvidia Ampere livestream event

[kalniel]

Ryan Smith from AT made some performance/watt calculations:
https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/stat...87187886538752

Not such a big increase!

Yeah they've done what some people have been accusing AMD of - pushing performance by throwing more watts at it. Looks like people looking for decent efficiency gains will have to skip this generation (unless AMD do something unexpected, but that's not likely) and wait for 5nm TSMC, which is looking great.

[DanceswithUnix]

TSMC's 7nm is fairly well known to have yield issues.

Really? I thought it was fairly well known to have excellent yields. 5nm is shaping up even better.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16028...t-rates-for-n5

So from those figures, over 90% of AMD's CPU chiplets, which aren't far off 1cm^2 in size, will be defect free. Of the few die that get hit with a defect, chances are it will be in a core or some L3 cache you can fuse off to sell the die as a lower end part.

For GPU use, there is a good chance that a top end 8cm^2 die will have one fault, so best expect to ship with one shader cluster disabled.

Anyone remember the Radeon VII, supposed to be the king 7nm GPU but it's went EOL after a couple of months on sale and has yet to be superseded

It was a re-badged chip intended for AI researchers, and I expect as the AI field moves quite fast they were no longer competitive and weren't selling any more.

[kalniel]

same as the current 2080 super though?

Which is sort of enough for now but I think will look low compared to AMD's offerings (and indeed, consoles). I think we'll see refreshes with double the amount if people start moving to 4k gaming.

[Iota]

Interestingly, it seems to have been overlooked, the 3070 and the 3080 are no longer capable of SLI. It's now only available on the 3090.

The 2xxx series had it on the 2080 / 2080Ti, but not the 2070.

[Jonj1611]

Found this : https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce...3600d40a18050d

£469 for the 3070

or £649 for the 3080

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce...3600d40a18050d

£1399 for the 3090

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce...3600d40a18050d

[kalniel]

In the livestream, Jensen pitched the 3080 at pascal owners waiting for a big performance increase. Well they've certainly got that, but they're paying almost twice the watt cost to do so!

From Nvidia's own website figures:

1080 = 180W
3080 = 320W

This is not a trend I like.

[ik9000]

Interestingly, it seems to have been overlooked, the 3070 and the 3080 are no longer capable of SLI. It's now only available on the 3090.

The 2xxx series had it on the 2080 / 2080Ti, but not the 2070.

2070 super had it too

[DanceswithUnix]

3080 = 320W

<Eyes factory overclocked Vega 56> ... <shrugs>

Lower power use is nice, but at least your legs won't get cold (assuming your PC vents under the desk like mine does)


Lack of SLI is interesting, but SLI seems to be seriously out of fashion these days.

[kalniel]

<Eyes factory overclocked Vega 56> ... <shrugs>

Lower power use is nice, but at least your legs won't get cold (assuming your PC vents under the desk like mine does)

Heh. I want to avoid a PSU upgrade...

[Jonj1611]

At that power usage would you want 2 cards!

[DanceswithUnix]

At that power usage would you want 2 cards!

Perhaps as I get older, with careful airflow it could be like a virtual blanket over my legs without the weight of an actual blanket

[kalniel]

Perhaps as I get older, with careful airflow it could be like a virtual blanket over my legs without the weight of an actual blanket

Dyson probably have a patent on that

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Heh. I want to avoid a PSU upgrade...

Probably best to wait for the AMD GPUs then. From what I gather Samsung 8NM(which is a 10NM variant) has decentish density but not the best power characteristics. TSMC 7NM OTH,seems to be better WRT to power.

It is estimated that the 56CU XBox Series X GPU,running at 1.8GHZ is consuming under 140W.

[kalniel]

Probably best to wait for the AMD GPUs then. From what I gather Samsung 8NM(which is a 10NM variant) has decentish density but not the best power characteristics. TSMC 7NM OTH,seems to be better WRT to power.

It is estimated that the 56CU XBox Series X GPU,running at 1.8GHZ is consuming under 140W.

Yes agreed re power, but what I want to see from AMD is more efficient bandwidth and reduced command list overheads. The 5700XT is already beginning to bottleneck on PCIe 3 while equivalent NVidia cards weren't. Ditto draw call overheads in DX11. Yes, FS2020 I'm looking at you.

The consoles have low power characteristics but they also have very wide access to bandwidth and no OS overhead so these problems are masked.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Yes agreed re power, but what I want to see from AMD is more efficient bandwidth and reduced command list overheads. The 5700XT is already beginning to bottleneck on PCIe 3 while equivalent NVidia cards weren't. Ditto draw call overheads in DX11. Yes, FS2020 I'm looking at you.

The consoles have low power characteristics but they also have very wide access to bandwidth and no OS overhead so these problems are masked.

The thing is though the 56CU GPU part of the SOC is around 170MM2,and running at a fixed 1.8GHZ,whereas the PS5 GPU is well over 2GHZ,in a TDP constrained console. Also remember the GDDR6 is feeding the CPU and any other coprocessors in the SOC. It's competing for memory bandwidth. Also,the XBox Series X is basically running a cut down Windows 10.

Its quite clear,that Navi2 is not only denser,but its voltage/clockspeed curve is much higher than RDNA1.

Another thing - the consoles are a Zen2 CPU and an RDNA2 GPU. Lots of games are multiplatform now,and it pretty much means those dev kits are going to be Zen2 and an RDNA2 GPU. That tells me,as time progresses,games will be increasingly optimised to work better on these components and around any potential issues. This is unlike the previous ones,where the Jaguar based CPUs were so weak,literally most dev kits would have been something Intel based.

I also have an SFF PC,and these Nvidia GPUs(even if I were to spend so much money),don't appeal to me with their high board powers and weird coolers. The GA102 based GPUs are meant to work with systems using AIO water coolers,ideally with front mounted radiators - with an air cooler,its going to just heat the CPU up. With a sandwich type case,it won't work at all.

The RTX3070 looks more reasonable,but its more than what I have in power consumption. If AMD is more efficient,especially if I also upgrade to a Zen3 CPU,I don't think the DX11 overhead is going to be that bad anyway.

Then the other aspect is the Open source Linux drivers are better on AMD now.

Anyway,I am not in any hurry to upgrade anyway so can evaluate what its out there over time.

[Crowls]

In the livestream, Jensen pitched the 3080 at pascal owners waiting for a big performance increase. Well they've certainly got that, but they're paying almost twice the watt cost to do so!

From Nvidia's own website figures:

1080 = 180W
3080 = 320W

This is not a trend I like.

What's the figure for the 2080 though, is this a steady climb, a jump with rtx or a jump with the 3xxx range?