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General Discussions

black_zion
MVP
‎06-14-2018 08:01 AM

WCCFTech: The AMD Inside Story, Navi GPU Roadmap And The Cost Of Zen To Gamers

Want an article full of despair for anyone who isn't an AMD stockholder?

https://wccftech.com/exclusive-amd-navi-gpu-roadmap-cost-zen/

It turns out that Lisa Su was focused primarily on bringing back AMD’s CPU side of things, and establishing a strong semi-custom GPU side. Maintaining leadership in the descrete graphics market (gamers) is a costly business and with the finite amount of resources the company had, something had to give.

Catering to gamers was not part of the win-condition; making AMD a viable, financially robust company was. Here is a fun fact: Vega was designed primarily for Apple and Navi is being designed for Sony – the PS5 to be precise.

This meant that the graphics department had to be tied directly to the roadmap that these semi-custom applications followed. Since Sony needed the Navi GPU to be ready by the time the PS5 would launch (expectedly around 2020) that is the deadline they needed to work on. Similarly, for Vega, Apple’s timeline is what actually dictated the release of the GPU and not the other way around. AMD’s Radeon graphics cards were intricately tied to the industry’s semi-custom roadmaps by design and that is something that a lot of people disagreed with. This is also what, I suspect, precipitated the departure of key executives including the RTG boss, Raja Koduri.

Remember when Lisa said that ‘7nm GPUs will be arriving for gamers’? Well, notice she never said 7nm Vega will be arriving for gamers – the GPU in question was Navi. Navi 10 to be more specific, and from what I know, this will not be a high-end part. It looks like NVIDIA won’t be facing any competition on the gaming side of things from Radeon even in 2019.

2 Replies
black_zion
In response to kingfish
MVP
‎06-15-2018 11:00 AM

You know when I saw Intel was making a GPU I figured it'd be a prosumer device, and they'd be like IBM and focus on the high margin market, but with AMD focusing on the processional and semi-custom sector and giving gamers the leftovers, at least through 2020, it does leave the door wide open for Intel to hit the gaming sector hard, and with them hating nVidia, if they support adaptive sync, and if they push manufacture processes and innovations, it could effectively force AMD out of the market...