So for today’s AMD Financial Analyst Day, AMD has released a little bit more information as part of the next step of their campaign. The first Vega product to be released has a name, it has a design, and it has performance figures. Critically, it even has a release date. I hesitate to call this a full announcement in the typical sense – AMD is still holding some information back until closer to the launch – but we now finally have a clear picture of where the Vega generation kicks off for AMD.
First Ryzen, now Vega, with Ryzen 9 on the way. AMD is on a roll, and Intel is scrambling. Competition!
One of the cases where you are probably wrong Thom.
I really would like AMD to succeed, and Ryzen is an OK CPU, but I think their share prices will fall back to under 10$ a year from now.
I think they are too resource constrained to compete on both CPU and GPU fronts, and the small gains they achieved with Ryzen will be swallowed by their loss on the GPU. Vega is nice, but NVIDIA will be one step ahead as usual + Intel only loses some margins for the next 1 or 2 year, that is not big deal.
AMD is fulfilling their strategy this was planned into their share price by investors. They knew they would have a dead spot and the Ryzen architecture being their make or break. I have a ryzen 5 and I have to say, it is exceptional. Side by side with and i5 it is better able to cope with load change and the extra cores make it great for running local VMs.
The big thing for AMD is they have secured Dell and HP contracts to use their chips. If they get out into the optiplex, it’s a game changer.
Looking for a Ryzen based Vostro to update my A8 based Vostro laptop
Welcome back AMD, you’ve never looked so fresh and healthy.
Intel is “CPU”.
NVidia is “GPU”
AMD is “CPU + GPU”.
It would be logical to infer that AMD would have the potential for a more flexible/broader product/technology strategy; i.e. there are reasons to believe that there can be a good “upside” to AMD.
While AMD bought ATI, Intel did not buy NVidia.
That must mean something good for AMD.
Intel makes CPU+GPU as well as just CPU. They’ve long had their own GPU line, which can’t compete with either AMD (ATI), or nVidia, so they’ve kept it for their CPU+GPU mobile market chips.
No. They just sell regular computers with their GPU on the main board as well. Up to you to power you rig with a stronger horse if needed. Several business and office computers doesn’t need much that Intel’s HD graphics that also quite improved with time and are perfectly OpenGL 4 capable.
To clarify, and in agreement with your comment, I meant “GPU” to refer to the more powerful GPUs capable of decent gaming and good candidates for VR/AR (virtual/augmented reality) applications; part of my programming work is 3D game engine research/development and I implicitly assumed the powerful-GPU-context, not the low power GPUs useful for business/office/etc. graphics (the latter are still useful for many people of the non-{gamer, technical} variety).
Apple’s OSX is my primary software development platform prior to potential porting to other operating systems and being a 3D graphics guy I was surprised why a multimedia-centric company like Apple would shove a non-performant oriented GPU (Intel rather than NVidia/AMD) in the mac-mini. Even make the mac-min abit fatter for cooling of a decent GPU. I say this since a mac-mini “weaponised” with a real/powerful GPU (at least supporting OpenGL 4.0) would be a convenient software development box for us “graphics” dudes.
I hope that AMD’s CPU/GPU stance, with possible side-effect being pressure on Intel/NVidia, may lead to Apple having easy access to options about a more functional mac-mini, etc.
My theory is that Apple will have to realise that, in a philosophical/creative sense, selling iPhones as their main product is not enough even though it’s their “cash cow” since Apple may risk being confused as primarily a seller of mobile phones. Thus it will have to go back to it’s roots and start to frequently refresh it’s computer product lines; e.g. a modular/fatter mac mini useful for pro/consumer usage.
Let’s wait and see.
All this does not matter if amd cannot put together a proper implementation of opencl, and they don’t start supporting open-source with better drives. In many case nvidia is the only option now.
And here it is again that amd is a resource constrained company which has to fight on two fronts at once
Yeah, and considering how well they do despite their constraints, that tell a lot.
You seem a bit out of date on your info… Since AMD’s compute platform *is* open… Raja Koduri even mentioned it specifically as a selling point in their 2017 financial analyst date presentations.
https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute
While it isn’t OpenCL 2+ yet… the compiler itself does support any syntax updates just not the API updates yet. They also have an open CUDA implementation there HCC.
That isn’t accurate… Intel GPUs power tons of low end desktops ie (what your grandparents, 50+% of business users and just about all kiosks will be running)…. the win the lions share of GPU sales just because they sold a CPU + any GPU at all.
Man this is gonna make facebook so fast!