Wednesday, August 2nd 2017
AMD Says Vega Delays Necessary to Increase Stock for Gamers
In an interview, AMD's Chris Hook justified Vega's delayed release due to a wish to increase available stock for gamers who want to purchase the new high-performance architecture by AMD. In an interview with HardOCP, Chris Hook had this to say:
"Part of the reason it's taken us a little longer to launch Vega - and I'll be honest about that - is that we wanted to make sure we were launching with good volume. (...) Obviously we've got to compensate for things like coin-miners, they're going to want to get their hands on these. We believe we're launching with a volume that will ensure that gamers can get their hands on them, and that's what's important to us."
It appears that AMD tried their best to increase production and stock volumes so as to mitigate price fluctuations upon Vega's entry to the market due to above normal demand from cryptocurrency miners. The jury is still out on whether Vega will be an option for mining due to its exquisite architecture, however. Still, this sounds as good a reason as any to delay Vega for as long as it has been already. Just a few more days until we see what AMD managed with this one, folks. Check the video after the break.
Source:
HardOCP YouTube Channel
"Part of the reason it's taken us a little longer to launch Vega - and I'll be honest about that - is that we wanted to make sure we were launching with good volume. (...) Obviously we've got to compensate for things like coin-miners, they're going to want to get their hands on these. We believe we're launching with a volume that will ensure that gamers can get their hands on them, and that's what's important to us."
It appears that AMD tried their best to increase production and stock volumes so as to mitigate price fluctuations upon Vega's entry to the market due to above normal demand from cryptocurrency miners. The jury is still out on whether Vega will be an option for mining due to its exquisite architecture, however. Still, this sounds as good a reason as any to delay Vega for as long as it has been already. Just a few more days until we see what AMD managed with this one, folks. Check the video after the break.
105 Comments on AMD Says Vega Delays Necessary to Increase Stock for Gamers
Stock increase could be a reason but it's most definitely not the only reason.
I hope FP16 isn't used for mining nonsense, otherwise, we can kiss buying of RX Vega goodbye...
At $399 starting price I doubt miners will jump the Vega bandwagon right away (especially if current "leaked" benchmarks and power consumption are taken into consideration).
Even if you give Vega56 a generous 30-32MH/s, and you put together 5 of them, it will take you more than 8 month to get your money back just for cards, not including an additional investment into a 1500W PSU and a freezer cabinet, since even RX480 farm does not require that much upkeep.
I'm still not mining... just saying...
I think they are full of $h1t and simply can't satisfy stock even for enthusiast market. Even less so for mainstream PC gamers. Not sure whether it's because of HBM2 shortage, or because AMD started the hype way too early, but in either case mining scare has nothing to do with delays.
Obviously I'm joking. Stock is limited because of the usual suspect, I'd imagine. HBM 2.
Miners didn't touch the Vega FE because it mined like a 1070 while costing 2.5-4x the price and used 2-3 times the power. They still aren't going to touch the Vega 56/64 unless Nvidia stock runs dry because the cards still cost similar to comparable ones and still use more power.
1. *IF* Vega has excellent preformance/price, there will be shortages
2. If it doesn't, it's still a different architecture, and a new currency based on it's advantages will arise soon - creating a currency is cheap and highly profitable
Current AMD's woes with GCN and crypto-mining are that the same architecture exists for years, so there is little profit going to AMD - old cards perform similar to new ones, and they tend to 'migrate' from old users, such as gamers, to miners. New architecture, in theory, could change that because there won't be existing stock of Vega's built for years, so AMD will see greater profits from miners...
Although I hope it will mine poorly because I don't want to buy it for 800+vat...
It's quite a preposterous situation. They're releasing next gen hardware with absolutely no software support at launch (they do say tile based rendering will be enabled...but I call baloney, b/c it sounds like it will be set with profiles).
GamersMinersEDIT: HBM has costed AMD twice now. The time to market the GPU had to be within the cycle of 1 year but both FURYX and VEGA got delayed due to HBM and GPU being a turd in VEGA.
I dunno man, I say that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.
There were plenty of architectural changes in vega core that you can't just call it "Fury" or "Fury shrink". Only thing really in common with Fiji is the structural arrangement of 64 CU's, shaders, ROP's and TMU's. And that's about it. Why they aren't getting massive performance gains for it, I don't know. You'd have to ask AMD about that...
Pascal also has some 'incredible architectural changes' but in the end its just Maxwell with some optimizations, and Maxwell is just Kepler with delta compression and a bit of streamlining. Those are the big changes that we've actually noticed and also show visible gains spec-wise, such as the much smaller VRAM bus Maxwell could apply.
In the same vein Vega is just a step forward from Fury, and the larger step forward in GCN was Polaris, because that was AMDs Maxwell and changed the efficiency of the architecture. Vega just has new bits to improve performance situationally.
About the stock size and AMD announcement, the only way I could explain that one is by the idea that due to Nvidia and AMD midrange stock being bought by miners, they want to have sufficient stock to sell to gamers. They never said they expected people to actually mine with Vega (well they do say it, but I'd call that a marketing spin because saying the opposite would look weird), but there is demand among gamers right now who are holding off on overpriced mining-capable cards.
But no matter how you twist that one, the bottom line is that stock accumulated slowly due to HBM.
TDP is the maximum generated heat output.
TDP should be lower than TGP, and not vice versa (science!).
For some reason people always confuse these two.