Thursday, May 11th 2017
Linux Drivers Point to Upcoming AMD RX Vega Liquid-Cooled, Dual-GPU Solution
Linux patches have already given us a "lot" of information (using "lot" generously there) on AMD's upcoming Vega graphics cards. I'd wager few enthusiasts would be looking towards a dual-GPU solution anymore - not with the mostly absent support from most recent games, of which Prey is a notable exception. Not unless there was some sort of hardware feature that exposed both dies as a single GPU for games and software to handle, but I'm entering the realm of joyous, hopeful thinking here.
Back to the facts, a May 10th Linux patch has added two more device ID's to a Vega family of products: 0x6864 and 0x6868. These additions bring the total number of Vega device ID's to a healthy 9, which is still less than Polaris' 12. This is in-line with the expected number of SKUs for Vega, which should be less than those available for Polaris.
There are two particular lines of code that suggest the involvement of liquid cooling:
Sources:
Phoronix, ETeknix, WCCFTech
Back to the facts, a May 10th Linux patch has added two more device ID's to a Vega family of products: 0x6864 and 0x6868. These additions bring the total number of Vega device ID's to a healthy 9, which is still less than Polaris' 12. This is in-line with the expected number of SKUs for Vega, which should be less than those available for Polaris.
- table->Tliquid1Limit = cpu_to_le16(tdp_table->usTemperatureLimitLiquid1);
- table->Tliquid2Limit = cpu_to_le16(tdp_table->usTemperatureLimitLiquid2);
- table->FanGainPlx = hwmgr->thermal_controller. advanceFanControlParameters.usFanGainPlx;table->TplxLimit = cpu_to_le16(tdp_table->usTemperatureLimitPlx);
51 Comments on Linux Drivers Point to Upcoming AMD RX Vega Liquid-Cooled, Dual-GPU Solution
300 TDP, liquid cooled. ~20 Tf, because of the lower clocks..
I think Dual Vega will basically be an answer to upcoming Volta and a tool to beat current NVIDIA's Titan Xp. If what you guys say of showing multiGPU to games as single GPU, if that is true and they have the means to somehow achieve that, that's pretty awesome.
It was a blast while it lasted, but it's really not a "sensible" option for pushing frames - as you can now tell from the fact I sold it on and went for a 1050ti.
Dual GPU cards are dead imo, they get very little support, and hinder themselves due to design constraints. At this stage I'd not only not recommend a single card dual gpu option, I just straight up wouldn't recommend bothering with SLI or Crossfire anymore. Too little support.
Always buy the fastest single gpu you can afford for trouble free gaming.
For software development where the latency might be less of an issue (VR - like Radeon Pro), sure it's viable.
It doesn't appear to be liquid cooled, as it has provision for two 4 pin PWM fans, and it also has a dual BIOS switch, the chips are marked E.S. too.
Edit: I'm running a 290x+290 xfire set up atm...with the games that scale, its so nice(Crysis 3, Tomb Raider) while others (Gears 4, Far Cry) it sucks. Although there is support for gears, I don't have any scaling whatsoever. Granted it maybe due to the fact of combo I have running but it's a no go.
Volta is 12nm, the tie over would be Vega 20 on 7nm.
@uuuaaaaaa We need it now.
@Liviu Cojocaru I don't know about that future part. It's only a matter of time before GPUs reach that wall that we are starting to see in the CPU realm.
EDIT: Thinking back it was a tech out of sync with time. Integrated graphics needs fast memory, and that is hard to pull off on a budget. I am dying to see what the Zen APUs will be, and it would be so swell if you could pair them with the RX550.