AMD ON THE BACK FOOT?
Team Red needs Navi, and it needs it now
IT’S BEEN A ROUGH YEAR for AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group. A really rough one. We didn’t expect the slightly bashful underdog of GPU technology to produce anything astounding, but after delay, after delay, after delay, we did expect more than we ended up with. Vega feels very much like a dud, especially as far as gaming is concerned. And although it powers through cryptomining like a V8 through gasoline, when your flagship card can’t compete with a competitor’s 14-month-old solution in the things that really matter, you know you’ve got problems.
Combine that with the departure of Raja Koduri, AMD’s Radeon Tech Group Leader, leaving for Intel, from the outside, at least, things look dire. But are they really? We doubt Raja would have left if things with AMD’s next-gen architecture weren’t already shored up. And much like Jim Keller leaving before Ryzen made it to market, there’s the likelihood that Navi itself may also be finally on its way to completion, with the initial design stage out of the way. Sources suggest that AMD may indeed showcase one of its Navi GPUs at 2018’s SIGGRAPH event around August this year, with a full commercial release coming at the end of 2018.
So, what can we expect from the new architecture? Well, there are two exciting things to consider here. Firstly, there’s the drop to 7nm. Secondly, there’s AMD’s recent development of its new interconnect, aka Infinity Fabric. What does that mean? In short, Vega currently operates off the 14nm manufacturing process; 7nm equates to a 50 percent increase in the overall number of transistors and, in turn, stream processors. On top of that, with AMD’s Infinity Fabric, we may see the end of old-school monolithic GPU dies from the company. Instead of having one hard-to-manufacture, massive GPU die, as we’ve typically seen from GPU makers, AMD could do something similar to how it produces its Threadripper and Ryzen processors. In brief, smaller, less complicated GPU core complexes, with an interconnected fabric bridging performance between them, without increasing the complexity or cost of manufacturing the processors themselves.
It’s worth noting that both AMD and Nvidia are looking to move away from the monolithic designs, as dropping down to the next process node becomes too taxing a task to achieve in the current climate.
Although we have no way of quantifying what kind of performance increase we could see here, the notion of adding more cores, at a fraction of the complexity and cost, may make Navi AMD’s saving grace, and is certainly interesting when it comes to the future of GPU development.
But what about that 14nm+ refresh we keep hearing about? Well, our bet is we’ll see a 14nm refresh of the RX 580, Vega 56, and 64, with a new low-power manufacturing process, being rebadged as new mid to high-end GPUs, followed by one or two Navi 7nm cards in the same generation being the flagships with the new designs.