Dankness is a facility some consider to be unnatural. Personally, I embrace our null hypothesis overlords.
I am ever more convinced that you live in some parallel universe in which your statements are deeply insightful and eloquent. Until I find a portal to that universe however, I remain unable to understand what you mean whatsoever.
Look, it is designated as GCN 1.5.0 and 1.5.1. This means it is a GCN evolution. Even during the official presentation, they said it is a "hybrid" between GCN and another new architecture.
1.5.0 doesn't mean "backwards" compatibility - it is the version of the architecture itself..
Or it means that the backwards compatibility is itself not identical to any version of GCN, and thus requires some adaptations, thus making presenting it as GCN 1.5 a reasonable thing. That RDNA 1 in backwards compatibility mode is recognized as GCN 1.5 does not mean that the overall architecture is GCN 1.5.
Yeah if you want, but for me rdna is yet a gcn but tweaked to the better. Not something life changing seen from terascale vliw to gcn simd.
But to come back to what I said, we see same number of shaders 2560, same clock speed ~1000mhz, if you see my reference to r9 290.
"For you" - what does that mean? Does your opinion change the physical properties of the die? I certainly don't think so, and the undeniable fact is that RDNA - even in its not fully realized 1.0 form, where
parts of GCN are carried over wholesale - handles instructions and other crucial aspects of GPU operation in very different ways from GCN. Just because there are commonalities does not mean they are the same. Do you also say that all Ford cars are the same, just because they share a brand, and some even share engines and drivetrains? All modern GPUs operate in similar ways, as there are standards in place that they must follow, and there is a limited number of possible ways of following them. Also, it is pretty much a universal truth that the longer something is developed (such as GPUs, or cars, or toasters, etc.) changes over time will diminish simply due to the fact that the possibility of finding a better design among the limited possible designs fulfilling the desired function becomes increasingly difficult. There are always developments that break this trend, but over time it all normalizes into a downward slope in terms of the scope of changes. In other words: it is entirely natural that RDNA is less of a break from GCN than GCN was from VLIW, but that doesn't mean that it no longer qualifies as a new architecture. By that logic I might as well say all GPU architectures with unified shaders are the same. You see how that is problematic, right?