Agreed on all points really, I'm just more of a pessimist when it comes to 'magic' because really... there's never been any. As for what AMD said for Big Navi... lol. They said that for everything they released on the top of the stack and since Fury X none of it really worked out well. Literally nothing. It was always too late, too little, and just hot and noisy. RDNA1 was just GCN with a new logo. This time it'll be different, really? They're just going to make the next iterative step towards 'recovery'. It won't be a major leap, if they knew how to, they'd have done it years ago.
Sorry, I get that being skeptical is good, but what kind of alternate reality have you been living in? While the Fury X definitely wasn't a massive improvement over previous GCN GPUs beyond just being bigger, it certanly wasn't noisy - except for some early units with whiny pumps it's still one of the quietest reference GPUs ever released. As for perf/W, it mostly kept pace with the 980 Ti above 1080p, but it did consume a bit more power doing so, and had no overclocking headroom - the latter being the only area where AMD explicitly overpromised anything for the Fury X. Overall it was nonetheless competitive.
And as for RDNA1 being "just GCN with a new logo"? How, then does it manage to dramatically outperform all incarnations of GCN? Heck, the 7nm, 40CU, 256-bit GDDR6, 225W 5700X essentially matches the 7nm, 60CU, 4096-bit HBM2, 295W Radeon VII. At essentially the same clock speeds (~100MHz more stock vs. stock). So "essentially the same" to you means a 50% performance/CU uplift on a much narrower memory bus, at a lower power draw despite a more power hungry memory technology, on the same node? Now, obviously the VII is by no means a perfect GPU - far from it! - but equating that development to being "just GCN with a new logo" is downright ridiculous. RDNA1 is - from AMD's own presentation of it at launch, no less - a stepping stone between GCN and a fully new architecture, but with the most important changes included. And that is reflected in both performance and efficiency.
There have been
tons of situations where AMD have overpromised and underdelivered (Vega is probably the most egregious example), but the two you've picked out are arguably not that.
I'm not all that excited because all stars have already aligned long ago. You just gotta filter out the clutter, and those efficiency figures are among them. Reality shines through in the cold hard facts: limited to GDDR6, not as power efficient if they'd have to go for anything bigger than 256 bit, and certainly also not as small as they'd want, plus they've been aiming the development at a console performance target and we know where that is.
I'm not going to go into speculation on these specific rumors just because there's too much contradictory stuff flying around at the moment, and no(!) concrete leaks despite launch being a few weeks away. (The same applies for Zen 3 btw, which suggests that AMD is in full lockdown mode pre-launch.) But again, your arguments here don't stand up. How have they been "aiming the development at a console performance target"? Yes, RDNA 2 is obviously developed in close collaboration with both major console makers, but how does that translate to their biggest PC GPU being "aimed at a console performance target"? The Xbox Series X has 52 CUs. Are you actually arguing that AMD made that design, then went and said "You know what we'll do for the PC? We'll deliver the same performance with a 50% larger die and 33% more CUs! That makes sense!"? Because if that's what you're arguing, you've gone
way past reasonable skepticism.
You're also ignoring the indisputable fact that AMD's GPUs in recent years have been made on shoestring R&D budgets, with RDNA 1 being the first generation to even partially benefit from the Zen cash infusion. RDNA 2 is built almost entirely in the post-Zen period of "hey, we've suddenly got the money to pay for R&D!" at AMD. If you're arguing that having more R&D resources has
no effect on the outcome of said R&D, you're effectively arguing that
everyone at AMD is grossly incompetent. Which, again, is way past reasonable skepticism.
There are a few
plausible explanations here:
- AMD is going wide and slow with Navi 21, aiming for efficiency rather than absolute performance. (This strongly implies there will be a bigger die later, though there obviously is no guarantee for that.)
- AMD has figured out some sort of mitigation for the bandwidth issue (though the degree of efficiency of such a mitigation is obviously entirely up in the air, as that would be an entirely new thing.)
- The bandwidth leaks are purposefully misleading.
The
less plausible explanation that you're arguing:
- AMD has collectively lost its marbles and is making a huge, expensive die to compete with their own consoles despite those having much lower CU counts.
- Everyone at AMD is grossly incompetent, and can't make a high performance GPU no matter the resources.
If you ask me, there's reason to be wary of all the three first points, but
much more reason to disbelieve the latter two.
Needed bandwidth depends a lot on the cache system, data optimization and data compression. Let's see if AMD has done some "magic" with RDNA 2. If "Infinity Cache" is real and works as expected, why not 256-bit with GDDR6? It might still be a disadvantage in some cases at high resolutions. But it could give AMD an advantage with cost and power consumption that's worth it. Intel used an L4 cache on their Iris iGPUs before and it worked quite well.
