I don't understand the popularity of this argument. AMD is barely profitable - this kind of profit could have been made with clever accounting.
But people see a green bar on a plot and suddenly AMD is in fantastic condition.
Call me then they have profit margin like Nvidia or Intel. They're competing on the same market and have similar costs. Where's the profit?
And you know all this because Radeon VII is so cheap?
What else will you tell me? That 7nm chips will be more efficient and require less cooling?
Yes, in a distant future 7nm *may* become cheap. But at the moment it's still including a huge premium for R&D and the supply is very limited. And it may be like that for years.
So on one hand we have a new node that is very useful for smartphones makers, who can easily ask a $1000+ price for their flagship models despite the CPU being tiny and relatively cheap. They can pay a lot for 7nm.
On the other hand you have 3 companies making consumer CPUs and GPUs, who need 7nm to push performance, because that's what gaming clients demand. Their chips are huge and are a majority of PC cost.
IMO there is just one possible solution: gaming PC parts will become silly expensive. So if you're irritated by RTX or Intel 9th gen prices, brace yourself...
Millions of notebooks weren't enough for AMD to bother and make Zen more frugal. So yeah, why make cards that support a few AAA games indeed... Although in 2019 few will become few dozen and by 2021 most new games should support RTRT (if it catches on). I wonder when will AMD decide it's worth the fuss and whether they'll still be in business.
Are you sure you know what rapid packed math stands for? It just means doing 2 FP16 operations with FP32 - an idea coming straight from compute cards.
So first of all: in ideal situation it gives you 2x performance - that's far cry from what purpose built ASIC can do.
Second: this will work only in specific scenarios and, more importantly, only when you force it explicitly in the code. In other words: game engines would have to be rewritten for AMD.
So both ideologically and practically it's a lot like AVX-512.
Sorry mate... Sometimes I understand what you're trying to say and sometimes I don't. This is the latter case. Can you rewrite this sentence?
IMO it doesn't need to be in the same chip. You should be literally able to add RTRT or tensor cores on a separate card. It works in the Nvidia world pretty well - it's just a question of latency. But 2 chips on the same card? Should work perfectly well. The whole point of IF is being able to combine different circuit types.