AMD Ramps up GPU Production - Blames Availability of Graphics Memory
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Embra
Excellent!
fantaskarsef
Can't hurt anybody. Still, let's see this, I hope they get the job done.
(Not surprised that GDDR5 is becoming more available as it's old tech by now... we shall see about HBM2 though as even more chips / cards are going to have it than before).
schmidtbag
Out of curiosity, how much VRAM does mining require? If not much is needed, I wonder if some of the mining-specific models could just have a major reduction in VRAM and at a lower price. That way everybody wins: miners buy a GPU gamers don't want with no performance loss, more memory is available to gaming GPUs, and in turn production goes up to meet demands, while everything gets cheaper across the board.
Silva
I think it's too late, all the cards they put out will be bought by miners at inflated prices. Even if they can make more cards, most shops will not lower the prices and gamers aren't stupid.
At this time I woulnd't buy Polaris, because I had to buy an RX560 due to no stock of RX570 and eventually there will be a refresh or something new.
Our only hope is that they don't spike the price of the next gen GPU's and have them in a good amount of supply so we (gamers) can get them before they vanish again.
LEEc337
Maybe too late for this round of mining but maybe an idea for the board partners to consider In the future
D3M1G0D
I don't know about other crypto currencies, but Ethereum (which is the biggest coin mined by GPUs) is memory hard, using a DAG file in order to work (this is the main reason why it cannot be mined with ASICs, like Bitcoin). It loads the entire DAG into memory, and the size of the DAG increases over time / with each epoch (currently, it's about 2.5 GB). For future compatibility, Ethereum miners want as much VRAM as possible - 4 GB would do for a couple of years, but 8 or more would be ideal. The speed and latency of the memory also heavily influences hashing performance so miners want the fastest memory possible with the lowest latency. Naturally, this kind of VRAM is also ideal for gamers.
Kaarme
Memory manufacturers won't easily increase the quantity of memory being produced because right now with the limited supply the prices are obscenely high. That generates massive profits for the manufacturers. There are simply too few manufacturers for the market to work as it should.
Quicks
What happen to the price fixing story?
kruno
You mean memory price fixing that China is investigating, well they are doing just that , investigating , it takes time and a lot of effort to find connections and collusion's , if there are any .
fOrTy_7
The situation got even worse since Micron and other companies created a consortium that will adapt GDDR6 to other technologies, e.g. high performance network switches, 5G mobile infrastructure and automotive. Mobile market competing with PC market is one of the reasons that DDR4 prices went almost +100% last year. Sh!t just hit the fan.
I kinda regret I didn't upgrade my GPU last year before all this started to happened.
robintson
AMD is doing pretty well by selling their latest graphics cards to miners with inflated prices due to shortage of their graphic cards. Nvidia graphic cards on the other side are more available and their prices are not inflated as AMD cards.
Also AMD is targeting miners right now and don't care too much now about their loyal gaming community.
schmidtbag
First of all, retailers are the ones hiking up the prices, not the manufacturers.
Second, uh... you think $1500 for a 1080Ti isn't inflated? Or how about $1100 for a 1070?
fOrTy_7
That might be a situation like six months ago. In Europe most nVidia cards are out of stock in major shop networks and the one that left have added +50% to MSRP price. That is for cards that were released year ago.
D3M1G0D
I laughed at this so hard. More available? Not inflated? Not even close! I was eyeing a GTX 1080 Ti last year for about $950 CAD - today, it's priced at $1525 CAD and is completely out of stock! You need to get your eyes checked or something because you're clearly not seeing straight.
robintson
First of all, the price of any product is not determined only by the retailers, it is determined by many other factors on which the retailer makes the price.
Second, as I wrote "Nvidia graphic cards on the other side are more available and their prices are not inflated as AMD cards". Go and have a look at AMD graphic cards prices and availability.
robintson
Yes,go and have a look at AMD graphic cards prices and availability.
schmidtbag
And if you paid attention to the news, both AMD and Nvidia are not keen on the high prices, since it's pissing off consumers. Miners are not long-term customers, they're just in it for the short run, so they're not appealing to cater to.
By that terrible logic, that's like saying "gold isn't valuable because platinum is a lot more valuable". It doesn't matter if Nvidia GPUs are more available with mildly "better" inflation - the point is they're still hard to get and obscenely expensive.
D3M1G0D
You don't seem to get it so I'm going to spell it out for you: both AMD and Nvidia cards are massively inflated and out of stock. Both. An Nvidia card that normally sells for $700 is now being sold for $1200, and a AMD card that normally sells for $300 is being sold for $500.
If you knew anything about mining then you'd know that Nvidia cards are just as good for mining as AMD cards (my GTX 1080 matches or outperforms my RX 580 in NiceHash miner) so GPUs from both vendors are affected.
Kaarme
That's kind of funny because right now gold is actually more expensive than platinum or palladium.
As far as I know Nvidia and AMD aren't charging significantly more for the GPUs (although I'm sure AMD might have needed to raise the price of the Vega+HBM2 package since HBM2 ought to be more expensive as well). It's the card making partners and retail that are swimming in cash. Of course I could be wrong, but I don't believe so. In fact I'm not even sure I'd blame them if they had increased the prices for the time being since why should they get a smaller share when the card partners and retail are inflating the prices so witlessly?
Fox2232
On Fury X, I had memory read latency reduced by 1 cycle and memory write latency by 8 cycles. Very noticeable on compute benchmarks.
There are other tweaks I managed to do to HBM1, but their effect was minimal and some caused instability.
Gaming effect of those changes were within margin of error. And tweaks which actually improved fps butchered compute workloads.
That's because games benefit more from total achievable bandwidth than from latency, as GPUs are designed to take big chunks of gaming data (textures, shadow maps, ...) and process them in parallel.
And I noticed that enabling certain functionalities from jedec's HBM documentation did not have described effect. So, Fiji either did not implement everything properly on HW level, or vBIOS was not complete.
(Saddest one is access method to 4 or 2 or 1 stack block and burst length. Those things should have affected achievable clock, they did not. But that probably has to do something with 50MHz internal steps for clocks on Fiji.)
