AMD Says Vega Delays Necessary to Increase Stock for Gamers

[Raevenlord]

In an interview, AMD's Chris Hook justified Vega's delayed release due to a wish to increase available stock for gamers who want to purchase the new high-performance architecture by AMD. In an interview with HardOCP, Chris Hook had this to say:

"Part of the reason it's taken us a little longer to launch Vega - and I'll be honest about that - is that we wanted to make sure we were launching with good volume. (...) Obviously we've got to compensate for things like coin-miners, they're going to want to get their hands on these. We believe we're launching with a volume that will ensure that gamers can get their hands on them, and that's what's important to us."

It appears that AMD tried their best to increase production and stock volumes so as to mitigate price fluctuations upon Vega's entry to the market due to above normal demand from cryptocurrency miners. The jury is still out on whether Vega will be an option for mining due to its exquisite architecture, however. Still, this sounds as good a reason as any to delay Vega for as long as it has been already. Just a few more days until we see what AMD managed with this one, folks. Check the video after the break.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[HTC]

Rubbish: they could allow reviewers to fully benchmark the cards while waiting for availability but they don't.

Stock increase could be a reason but it's most definitely not the only reason.

 

[RejZoR]

How are they going to handle miner demands when single miner can buy like 50 cards for their dumb a** mining farms. And there aren't just 3 such miners... If they are good for mining, they'll be unobtainable since miners are probably already talking with distributers. So, when it launches, there won't be any to buy... Because distributers don't give a F if it's used for gaming or mining, a sale is a sale for them where AMD does care because gaming cards used for mining means they are not gaining market share among gamers.

I hope FP16 isn't used for mining nonsense, otherwise, we can kiss buying of RX Vega goodbye...

 

[Chaitanya]

As long as miners dont snatch up everything.

 

[silentbogo]

Lol. It's only a week after Lisa Su said "we didn't have cryptocurrency in our forecast, and we're not looking at it as a long-term growth driver".

At $399 starting price I doubt miners will jump the Vega bandwagon right away (especially if current "leaked" benchmarks and power consumption are taken into consideration).
Even if you give Vega56 a generous 30-32MH/s, and you put together 5 of them, it will take you more than 8 month to get your money back just for cards, not including an additional investment into a 1500W PSU and a freezer cabinet, since even RX480 farm does not require that much upkeep.
I'm still not mining... just saying...

I think they are full of $h1t and simply can't satisfy stock even for enthusiast market. Even less so for mainstream PC gamers. Not sure whether it's because of HBM2 shortage, or because AMD started the hype way too early, but in either case mining scare has nothing to do with delays.

 

[the54thvoid]

Maybe they like all that compute especially for mining. Maybe AMD see miners as a better market after all but can't admit it to the gamers. Maybe Vega was built for .... mining. Why else create such s powerful card that they have admitted is more a match for 1080 than the ti.

Obviously I'm joking. Stock is limited because of the usual suspect, I'd imagine. HBM 2.

 

[TheGuruStud]

Why? No gamer will buy till the driver team gets their heads out of their asses. It's still running with Fiji driver and for some reason incurring a big performance penalty.

 

[okidna]

The longer the delay = the longer miner can save up to buy in bulk

 

[Ubersonic]

Obviously we've got to compensate for things like coin-miners, they're going to want to get their hands on these.

Why? lol.

Miners didn't touch the Vega FE because it mined like a 1070 while costing 2.5-4x the price and used 2-3 times the power. They still aren't going to touch the Vega 56/64 unless Nvidia stock runs dry because the cards still cost similar to comparable ones and still use more power.

 

[snakefist]

I'm reasonably sure that AMD internally tested crypto-currencies mining possibilities. Even if we (or miners, for that matter) don't know them yet, they are probably well aware of them.

1. *IF* Vega has excellent preformance/price, there will be shortages
2. If it doesn't, it's still a different architecture, and a new currency based on it's advantages will arise soon - creating a currency is cheap and highly profitable

Current AMD's woes with GCN and crypto-mining are that the same architecture exists for years, so there is little profit going to AMD - old cards perform similar to new ones, and they tend to 'migrate' from old users, such as gamers, to miners. New architecture, in theory, could change that because there won't be existing stock of Vega's built for years, so AMD will see greater profits from miners...

 

[Kohl Baas]

Why? lol.

Miners didn't touch the Vega FE because it mined like a 1070 while costing 2.5-4x the price and used 2-3 times the power. They still aren't going to touch the Vega 56/64 unless Nvidia stock runs dry because the cards still cost similar to comparable ones and still use more power.

This might be a mild indication that Vega performs better than we see at the moment. And there are a few currencys that can be mined quite well with Vega FEE after some tweaks.

Although I hope it will mine poorly because I don't want to buy it for 800+vat...

 

[TheGuruStud]

This might be a mild indication that Vega performs better than we see at the moment. And there are a few currencys that can be mined quite well with Vega FEE after some tweaks.

Although I hope it will mine poorly because I don't want to buy it for 800+vat...

Wasn't there some rumor that AMD has fixed the hashrate bug and it will released in an upcoming update?

 

[RejZoR]

Why? No gamer will buy till the driver team gets their heads out of their asses. It's still running with Fiji driver and for some reason incurring a big performance penalty.

Where are people getting this idiocy with Fiji drivers... VEGA. IS. NOT. FIJI.

 

[ViperXTR]

is mining good for HBM2? i hear GDDR5X is not good for mining thats why they prefer the 1070

 

[TheGuruStud]

Where are people getting this idiocy with Fiji drivers... VEGA. IS. NOT. FIJI.

B/c there are minimal changes to the driver so far meaning zero Vega features have been enabled.

It's quite a preposterous situation. They're releasing next gen hardware with absolutely no software support at launch (they do say tile based rendering will be enabled...but I call baloney, b/c it sounds like it will be set with profiles).

 

[Liviu Cojocaru]

Stock will be low but didn't the same happened with the Pascal at launch???

 

[RejZoR]

Yeah, that sucks, I can't deny that. But that's AMD working their stuff with minimal resources because they don't have the luxury NVIDIA has.

 

[Xajel]

Increase Stock for Gamers Miners

 

[yotano211]

Mad angry gamers can relax cuz us miners wont be touching this thing according to power draw and founders edition hash rate. You mad angry gamers can now relax and take a bubble bath.

 

[jigar2speed]

That's a lie AMD, you screwed up with Design (HBM, GPU both), accept it and work for another day.

EDIT: HBM has costed AMD twice now. The time to market the GPU had to be within the cycle of 1 year but both FURYX and VEGA got delayed due to HBM and GPU being a turd in VEGA.

 

[Basard]

Where are people getting this idiocy with Fiji drivers... VEGA. IS. NOT. FIJI.

Yeah! A whole new architecture, just like the 1080 vs 980.... lol.....
I dunno man, I say that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.

 

[RejZoR]

That's the equivalent of saying, if it has a steering wheel, then it's a car. Until you realize boats also have steering wheels. And airplanes. And trucks.

There were plenty of architectural changes in vega core that you can't just call it "Fury" or "Fury shrink". Only thing really in common with Fiji is the structural arrangement of 64 CU's, shaders, ROP's and TMU's. And that's about it. Why they aren't getting massive performance gains for it, I don't know. You'd have to ask AMD about that...

 

[EarthDog]

How are they going to handle miner demands when single miner can buy like 50 cards for their dumb a** mining farms. And there aren't just 3 such miners... If they are good for mining, they'll be unobtainable since miners are probably already talking with distributers. So, when it launches, there won't be any to buy... Because distributers don't give a F if it's used for gaming or mining, a sale is a sale for them where AMD does care because gaming cards used for mining means they are not gaining market share among gamers.

I hope FP16 isn't used for mining nonsense, otherwise, we can kiss buying of RX Vega goodbye...

depends on if that performamce outweighs the notable increase in power consumption vs other cards...

 

[Vayra86]

Yeah! A whole new architecture, just like the 1080 vs 980.... lol.....
I dunno man, I say that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck.

An ugly duck at that.

Pascal also has some 'incredible architectural changes' but in the end its just Maxwell with some optimizations, and Maxwell is just Kepler with delta compression and a bit of streamlining. Those are the big changes that we've actually noticed and also show visible gains spec-wise, such as the much smaller VRAM bus Maxwell could apply.

In the same vein Vega is just a step forward from Fury, and the larger step forward in GCN was Polaris, because that was AMDs Maxwell and changed the efficiency of the architecture. Vega just has new bits to improve performance situationally.

About the stock size and AMD announcement, the only way I could explain that one is by the idea that due to Nvidia and AMD midrange stock being bought by miners, they want to have sufficient stock to sell to gamers. They never said they expected people to actually mine with Vega (well they do say it, but I'd call that a marketing spin because saying the opposite would look weird), but there is demand among gamers right now who are holding off on overpriced mining-capable cards.

But no matter how you twist that one, the bottom line is that stock accumulated slowly due to HBM.

 

[B-Real]

In the video, he speaks about TGP instead of TDP. What is the difference between the 2? Because he mentions about 50W lower numbers for the Vega56 and Vega64 air.