Radeon Vega 20 Will Have XGMI Interconnect
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Pimpiklem
Clawedge
Inter-Chip Global Memory Interconnect
Agent-A01
HeavyHemi
Fox2232
Vananovion
I second what Fox2232 said. If you want to know more, Gamers Nexus has a great video explaining why AMD had to use HBM2 on Vega, even though it made the cards more expensive -
[youtube=p9ih5vmcDEk] .
I'd also add, that HBM is a fairly new technology, while GDDR has been around for quite some time. I like to think about it as HDDs vs SSDs - SSDs used be out of reach of regular consumers when they first came out. Nowadays, no one sane uses an HDD for any sort of performance use-case. It is still some way off, but I think the same is going to happen with GDDR and HBM - GDDR will move down to budget solutions, while HBM will take mainstream and high-end stuff.
Agent-A01
Fox2232
JonasBeckman
Bus is a lot wider for the HBM cards for AMD but speed is hindered a bit. Fury caps out at I think it was around 320 - 360 GB/s when measured due to the core clock speed not keeping up so not really the theoretical max of 512 GB/s though the 4096 (4x 1024) bus width is nice but on it's own it's probably not a deciding feature. (290X had some 512-bit ring bus design being all the hype back when it launched, didn't really compete directly with NVIDIA's offerings and was apparently pretty complex and costly for AMD.)
Vega manages somewhere around 480 GB/s I think it was, Vega 64 that is and even that is slightly held back due to specs originally being 1 Ghz at 1.2v and not 945 Mhz at 1.35v though it's possible Vega 20 here will have the refresh chips hitting higher speeds without having to downclock and overvolt them.
(Clock speed I think the Frontier edition got it right, 1400 Mhz at 1.0v but it can boost up a bit higher. 1600 at 1.2v just generates a lot of extra heat and that turbo mode is ridiculous with power usage versus what little gains you get.)
Guess that with Vega 20 being more of a server or workstation card it might not matter too much for gaming and general consumer needs as the workload is more specialized although some of the improvements could carry over into Navi as a further tweak of the GCN arch although how much remains to be seen. 🙂
(The various other features the GPU lost also probably factor in even if overall performance gains might not have been quite all that AMD hyped them up to be though it looks like the primitive shaders are making a return with Navi at least in some form.)
EDIT: Well that and far as gaming goes catching up to the 1080Ti needs at least another 30% performance bump and then between that and the 2080Ti it could need another 20% at least to try and match that although I guess AMD isn't going try for the top GPU performance position but it will be interesting to see what's next. (Coming in several months after the 2000 series from NVIDIA isn't going to help things either.)
Not too sure about Vega 20 either, heard a lot of this type of deep learning already goes via CUDA so that makes it hard for AMD to get into this area I suppose. Also something that will be interesting to hear more about.
EDIT: And I guess we might see more from Intel next year too and what that card will bring.
Miners will have quite a few choices now ha ha. Well the 2000 series might actually exceed Vega now if they have faster memory but I guess that activity has lessened a bit too from how it was just a year ago.
(Well until it inevitably flares up again and some other popular coin type appears.)
Agent-A01