Wednesday, January 16th 2019
A Sprinkle of Salt: AMD Radeon VII Reported to Only be Available in Reference Design, no Custom Treatment
A report via Tom's Hardware.de says that AMD's plans for the upcoming Radeon VII are somewhat one-dimensional, in that only reference designs will be available for this particular rendition of the Vega architecture. And this doesn't mean"initial availability" only on reference cards, like NVIDIA has been doing with their Founder's editions; the report claims that at no point in time will there actually be a custom-designed Radeon VII. The quantity of Radeon VII GPUs will apparently be "strictly limited" come launch - a likely result of the decision to make use of TSMC's 7 nm process, which will have to serve not only AMD's Ryzen 3000 and Epyc CPUs when those are actually launched, but all of TSMC's other clients.
This is in contrast with AMD CEO Lisa Su's words during her CES keynote, who said that Radeon VII would be available from "several leading add-in board partners plan to offer the cards". According to a Tom's Hardware.de Taiwanese source, "You cannot leak anything that does not exist" in regards to third-party designs. And another Chinese source said "the quantity of Radeon VII is strictly limited… not sure if AMD wants to open AIB to have an own design later".
The saltiness is in the title for a purpose: we'd be very surprised with a decision such as this from AMD's part. Low availability to partners is better than no availability at all for a number of reasons. Let's not forget the damage it would do to AMD's ecosystem to only release a high-performance product - the one that AMD buyers have been waiting for since the original Vega) under their own branding, closing partners out of the profits they'd make on custom designs. It just doesn't strike us as a sensible business decision.
Source:
Tom's Hardware.de
This is in contrast with AMD CEO Lisa Su's words during her CES keynote, who said that Radeon VII would be available from "several leading add-in board partners plan to offer the cards". According to a Tom's Hardware.de Taiwanese source, "You cannot leak anything that does not exist" in regards to third-party designs. And another Chinese source said "the quantity of Radeon VII is strictly limited… not sure if AMD wants to open AIB to have an own design later".
40 Comments on A Sprinkle of Salt: AMD Radeon VII Reported to Only be Available in Reference Design, no Custom Treatment
The 4 cards mentioned are all custom Vega 64 designs I could find.
Everything else is just the reference model with stickers.
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-vii.c3358
www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-instinct-mi50.c3335Nope, the person you quoted did not specifically say custom cards, just AIB cards. Reference design cards with AIB brand are still AIB cards.
People arent up in arms for a lack of those cards, lol!! People are concerned over the lack of custom cooled/powered models... a more true representation of an AIB card. You can see the other person thinks in a similar manner. :)
If forecasts for a material drop in RAM pricing in the first half of 2019 are correct it seems plausible to expect AMD to have more pricing leverage in a month or so. At that point they can drop the direct to consumer sales price and AIBs can offer their versions of the card closer to the $699 price point.
I doubt the MI60 is selling at extremely high volumes, yet. As it gains more traction it will allow for more failed dies to be diverted to Radeon VII. At the same time the overall revenue per wafer will go up as more MI60s are yielded allowing for more aggressive pricing on Radeon VII. Combine the better pricing from wafer allocation with lower HBM prices and a $599 or less Radeon VII is a realistic possibility by the end of February.
Considering the excessively large die sizes on the 2000 series Nvidia cards and Nvidia desperate to maintain margins while their stock price is in a free fall it seems unlikely they will have much pricing leeway on their RTX cards.
The rumors of 1100 series cards where they pull out the useless tensor cores to reduce the die size seems very plausible. However, I suspect these 1100 series were a recently developed plan B after Nvidia discovered even their brainwashed followers have enough sense to thumb their noses at cards using tech that is still a year or more away from primetime. Perhaps this realization is the reason Jensen Huang was acting more unhinged than usual at CES.
As for AIB's... nobody consider/think existing Vega 64 design don't easily "port-over", in all probability I might even say the interposer are "pin-for-pin" drop-in to the existing PCB that Vega 64 had. MI50 300 TDP while I thought Vega 7 isn't suppose to be that high and Vega 64 was what a 295 TDP, so the power section might need nothing. AIB's have existing PCB and coolers that should not have an issue flipping from their existing Vega 64 customs I can't see AMD not have then build the next batch. I think this was rushed and kept under the radar so most AIB's weren't wrote in, but I don't believe AMD want this to be a Founders Edition kind of thing long term.