01-13-2017, 05:22 PM
I probably shouldn't have called the RX 480 a "flagship", but it is currently their top-of-the-line Arctic Islands offering, so let's not split hairs. You launch a new product line, and the best you can do is target mid-range GPUs? That's downright embarrassing. Let's not pretend that it isn't. It's also quite hypocritical to negatively state that Pascal is just a minor revision of Maxwell, when it took AMD 4 years to accomplish the same. And with Pascal, performance went up while real power consumption went down -- a feat AMD has yet to actually accomplish.
No, Vega isn't a whole different beast. It's the same shit that AMD has been shoveling for half a decade. GCN was "innovative" 5 years ago (in that they dropped VLIW and created a GPU architecture that looked a hell of a lot like an Nvidia GPU), but then again AMD didn't design GCN -- ATi did. There is literally nothing here that indicates that Vega is anything more than the same old tired GCN architecture with a long-overdue die shrink and better FP16 support. There is nothing in here to support your claim that Vega is a "major redesign," especially with regards to password cracking, as the ALUs and CUs remain unchanged for yet another year.
It seems to me you're taking all of AMD's marketing doublespeak at face value, while ignoring the fact that AMD have a history of stretching the truth (read: flat-out lying), and also ignoring the plain and simple fact that that AMD doesn't have the cash or the talent to produce a new GPU. They literally have not released a new architecture since acquiring ATi and firing all of their talent. There's a reason they've been limping to the barn with GCN for half a decade, trying to milk as much mileage out of it as possible. So let's not pretend that AMD is doing anything exciting or noteworthy, ok?
BFI_INT and BIT_ALIGN were the ONLY things AMD had going for it. They're the ONLY reason we ever used AMD GPUs in the first place. Now that Nvidia has LOP3.LUT, there's literally ZERO reason to ever consider an AMD GPU again. You want a $200 GPU that outperforms a GTX 1060? Go buy a used GTX 980.
No, Vega isn't a whole different beast. It's the same shit that AMD has been shoveling for half a decade. GCN was "innovative" 5 years ago (in that they dropped VLIW and created a GPU architecture that looked a hell of a lot like an Nvidia GPU), but then again AMD didn't design GCN -- ATi did. There is literally nothing here that indicates that Vega is anything more than the same old tired GCN architecture with a long-overdue die shrink and better FP16 support. There is nothing in here to support your claim that Vega is a "major redesign," especially with regards to password cracking, as the ALUs and CUs remain unchanged for yet another year.
It seems to me you're taking all of AMD's marketing doublespeak at face value, while ignoring the fact that AMD have a history of stretching the truth (read: flat-out lying), and also ignoring the plain and simple fact that that AMD doesn't have the cash or the talent to produce a new GPU. They literally have not released a new architecture since acquiring ATi and firing all of their talent. There's a reason they've been limping to the barn with GCN for half a decade, trying to milk as much mileage out of it as possible. So let's not pretend that AMD is doing anything exciting or noteworthy, ok?
BFI_INT and BIT_ALIGN were the ONLY things AMD had going for it. They're the ONLY reason we ever used AMD GPUs in the first place. Now that Nvidia has LOP3.LUT, there's literally ZERO reason to ever consider an AMD GPU again. You want a $200 GPU that outperforms a GTX 1060? Go buy a used GTX 980.