06-07-2015, 11:48 AM
That's a pretty good break-down. I'll break it down further:
AMD is hemorrhaging cash, and has been for years. Winning the bid for both consoles helped them for a couple of quarters, but they're losing huge in the big picture. This has resulted in massive layoffs and office closures, and the resignation of nearly all their upper management. There are a lot of clues to indicate they only have one person working on the Linux driver and libOpenCL. It has taken them 9 months to put out a decent driver to follow up 14.9!
Layoffs + no cash = no innovation. This is why AMD is limping to the barn with GCN for yet another generation (seriously, this architecture is 3.5 years old now!) They've just been doing a die shrink and tacking on more cores to create a new flagship, while re-branding the previous generation cards (280X = 7970, 280 = 7950, etc.) This model does not scale! And we're definitely seeing GCN reach its limits with the next-gen cards.
The 390X (or actually it looks like they're going to end up naming it the 490X) is basically a 7970 with double the cores. So basically a 7990 on one chip instead of two. This means it will have a total power draw of about 450W, but the 490X is rumored to have a max TDP of 300W. The math doesn't add up, so this card will throttle hard to keep power consumption under 300W -- much worse than the 295X2. Again, we've reached the limits of GCN.
490X is also rumored to be hybrid watercooled only, like the 295X2. While Nvidia is dramatically reducing power consumption, AMD's next flagship actually requires water cooling. Again, we've reached the limits of GCN.
So yes, this is the end of days for AMD. If they aren't acquired soon, they'll likely be out of business within the next 5 years. We'll see of Samsung is dumb enough to buy them.
Make no mistake: the only reason we've been tolerating AMD all these years is because they had BFI_INT and BIT_ALIGN_INT and slightly better integer performance on GPU, and also XOP on CPU. Now that Nvidia as LOP3.LUT and Intel has AVX2, there is absolutely no reason to buy AMD going forward.
AMD is hemorrhaging cash, and has been for years. Winning the bid for both consoles helped them for a couple of quarters, but they're losing huge in the big picture. This has resulted in massive layoffs and office closures, and the resignation of nearly all their upper management. There are a lot of clues to indicate they only have one person working on the Linux driver and libOpenCL. It has taken them 9 months to put out a decent driver to follow up 14.9!
Layoffs + no cash = no innovation. This is why AMD is limping to the barn with GCN for yet another generation (seriously, this architecture is 3.5 years old now!) They've just been doing a die shrink and tacking on more cores to create a new flagship, while re-branding the previous generation cards (280X = 7970, 280 = 7950, etc.) This model does not scale! And we're definitely seeing GCN reach its limits with the next-gen cards.
The 390X (or actually it looks like they're going to end up naming it the 490X) is basically a 7970 with double the cores. So basically a 7990 on one chip instead of two. This means it will have a total power draw of about 450W, but the 490X is rumored to have a max TDP of 300W. The math doesn't add up, so this card will throttle hard to keep power consumption under 300W -- much worse than the 295X2. Again, we've reached the limits of GCN.
490X is also rumored to be hybrid watercooled only, like the 295X2. While Nvidia is dramatically reducing power consumption, AMD's next flagship actually requires water cooling. Again, we've reached the limits of GCN.
So yes, this is the end of days for AMD. If they aren't acquired soon, they'll likely be out of business within the next 5 years. We'll see of Samsung is dumb enough to buy them.
Make no mistake: the only reason we've been tolerating AMD all these years is because they had BFI_INT and BIT_ALIGN_INT and slightly better integer performance on GPU, and also XOP on CPU. Now that Nvidia as LOP3.LUT and Intel has AVX2, there is absolutely no reason to buy AMD going forward.