Originally Posted by
Hardware Hoshi
Too bad it is not that easy to compare.
Fiji was a humongous chip with 596mm² in 28nm and had 275W TDP in the strongest version.The GTX 1070 is 16nm FinFet has around 314mm² die size and is listed for 150W TDP. Keep in mind AMd already had HBM used in Fiji cards, so there is no further power/heat advantage to gain.
The difference in manufacturing costs is pretty bad. AMD would have to improve the Vega chip quite dramatically. A simple shrink and some adjustments won't do. The costs and availability of HBM2 are another factor to count in.
The question is which Vega will be faster than the 1070. Some cut down version will be competitors to the 1070 too, yes. But the upper versions can not be simple multiplied like this. The bigger the chip / performance class is, the more difficult it gets to get all the shaders and transistors utilized. The tech doesn't scale infinitely. At some point you have dimishing returns.
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The clock speeds alone say nothing if there is no information how much the architecture itself scales. Your 10-15% dimishing returns may occure every +60 MHz form Fiji. At the same time the power requirements and heat output will rise similar to what AMd showed with Polaris 2.0 in the RX580. I personally say the outcome will highly be dependent on the scenario. Like Fiji had before, Vega will show better results i.e. higher resolutions?
Not entirely correct. Everybody above the $300 region has no option to go, if AMD is the prefered brand. This fact and the long waiting period is starting to annoy peopel to no end. In case AMD expands this another few months, some might be no longer patient and buy whatever is already in their budget... or just don't buy anything and wait for the next generation of GPUs.
IPC has not to do with the process node. It can only alter it slightly. IPC is mostly dependent on the used architecture. GCN as it was until Polaris does not scale very well. AMD had trouble utilizing all their shaders and had to resort to tricks like Async Compute. Their HBCC is the next step to get the 4096 shaders under control.
No matter where the Vega cards finally land, their price and the availability in the next two months will be a very deciding factor. Fiji failed at both, so let's hope AMD gets the HBM2 shortage under control very soon.