Tuesday, January 7th 2020
Expect High-end Navi: AMD CEO
At a Q&A session with the tech press in Las Vegas, AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su raised hopes of a high-end graphics card based on its "Navi" family of GPUs. Responding to a specific question by Gordon Ung from PC World on whether there will be a high-end competitor in the discrete graphics space, Dr Su stated that one should expect a "high-end Navi." Dr Su states: "I know those on Reddit want a high end Navi! You should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, and that it is important to have it. The discrete graphics market, especially at the high end, is very important to us. So you should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, although I don't usually comment on unannounced products."
For months now, it's been speculated that AMD has been working on a larger GPU die than "Navi 10." In 2020, AMD is expected to release the "Navi 20" familly of GPUs built on 7 nm+ (EUV) node, based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. The key design goals of RDNA2 are expected to be support for at least tier-1 variable-rate shading (VRS), and possibly hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. It's possible that "high-end Navi" belongs to this family of GPUs.
Sources:
AnandTech, PC World
For months now, it's been speculated that AMD has been working on a larger GPU die than "Navi 10." In 2020, AMD is expected to release the "Navi 20" familly of GPUs built on 7 nm+ (EUV) node, based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture. The key design goals of RDNA2 are expected to be support for at least tier-1 variable-rate shading (VRS), and possibly hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. It's possible that "high-end Navi" belongs to this family of GPUs.
45 Comments on Expect High-end Navi: AMD CEO
1. Release
2. Benchmarks
:peace:
P.S. I have doubts that they will challenge GTX 3xxx ( ye, ye I know it's RTX ).
I would guess if TSMC production is fully booked and hard to come by then making low volumes of very high profit big GPUs makes more sense than large amounts of low profit smaller ones now. As opposed to making high quantities of low profit GPU chips from GF to meet their quotas.
It seems like this quote can be interpreted in one of many ways; (like always with Lisa Su)
- A bigger Navi to compete with next-gen high-end products from Nvidia.
- A bigger Navi to compete with current high-end products from Nvidia.
- Any Navi faster than RX 5700 XT.
- A Navi with "high-end" features like HBM for the professional market.
The 7nm node is crowded right now with TSMC is full up to the head from orders and others wanting to enter this node... AMD is rumored to double their available 7nm/7nm+ wafers by TSMC starting Q3/H2 2020. Big navi will take up significant wafer space and right now there is isnt any left by TSMC who continuously increasing the production and continuously is filled...
Watch closely the video... the calculations add-up in the end...
The only high-end I expect from AMD is something that matches the performance level of Nvidias next gen Ampere GPUs like the 3080 Ti or whatever it will be called.
If what AMD calls high-end but the performance is like the 2080 Ti, then to me thats not high-end. At least not when they are only matching Nvidias pervious gen.
The reason Nvidia can have such high prices is because of having no competition.
Just look how much Intel dropped the price of the i9 10980XE compared to its previous gen.
I really hope AMD can deliver something that can compete with high-end Ampere.
And it looks to me that the answer is firm NO.NV is highly unlikely to roll out oversized chips in 2020,