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AMD-Wafer-Porn

AMD's Navi has been of interest to AMD fans since information technology first popped up on roadmaps, with hints of a next-generation retention subsystem and a "scalability" selection that might exist similar to the modular GPU designs that Nvidia is supposedly because for its own products. Outset, the hints. Equally Hot Hardware reports, some driver notes for a Linux driver update dorsum in July that were recently discovered reported:

[Alarm]: Should utilise –pci when using create_asic_from_script()
new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET => 0x12345670
new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET.enable[0:0]

GFX10 is a Navi reference, and in that location are plenty of other hints to ongoing Navi piece of work at AMD, from a job opening for a senior ASIC pattern and layout engineer (Shanghai, China) to various statements from AMD that it'southward working on 7nm ramps already (the remarks date to May of this year). A Navi tape-out now or in the next few months would clear the style for a professional product introduction late next summer or fall, with consumer cards arriving a few months later.

59428_03_amds-next-gen-navi-gpu-launching-august-2018

A hypothetical modular GPU

As for what the GPU will be, that's anyone's guess. AMD and Nvidia have both made noise about scalability and building distributed GPUs, but such designs come up with a lot of potential issues that need to exist addressed. GPU internal bandwidth is much, much higher than what we've seen in multi-cadre CPUs interconnects — think along the lines of 300GB/south, every bit opposed to 30GB/s. Building an interconnect that could keep all the subdivided GPU components suitably fed would exist a very careful balancing human activity. I'k non suggesting that NV, AMD, or both won't build it, but it may not be an easy road to commitment.

Bluntly, I'm non sure at present is the right time for AMD to be clever as far as GPU pattern is concerned. HBM and HBM2 may have delivered some benefits to AMD's overall power consumption profile, but the company has had to push all of its GPU designs extremely hard to match Nvidia'due south operation going back as far as Hawaii in 2013. Granted, Vega doesn't hit the 95C temperatures that Hawaii did, but AMD didn't really deliver the performance or power consumption that people were hoping for in 2017, either. If Navi cleans up cruft in the Vega design and delivers a large performance uplift thank you to further design refinements, so much the meliorate, even if it isn't a brand-new architecture or major pattern shift compared with Vega. Either way, repeated rumors are pointing to 2H 2018 for a refresh from Team Red.