tviceman
Diamond Member
GloFo sinks another AMD ship. They have got to get Zen/Vega away from them ASAP.
On the contrary, pro-AMD forum posters here seem to think P10 is actually a better jump in most metrics vs. 28nm GCN parts than GP104 is vs. Maxwell parts which means the process is not to blame. http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=38329784&postcount=58 Of course, he seems to think P10 is the spiritual successor to Tonga, while I think P10 is the successor to Pitcairn....
Anyways, I don't buy the excuse GloFo is to blame. 2 months ago all pro AMD posters said GloFo had better manufacturing capabilities than TSMC and 3 months ago a shrunk down Fiji would be only 20mm2 larger than P10. If P10 had come out with 390x performance and 120 watt power draw, would people be praising AMD for their amazing engineering or GLoFo for their ultra advanced fab process? Why is it that when AMD doesn't deliver it's not their fault? Aside from Pitcairn and Bonaire, GCN has been a power hungry architecture since it's first introduction. What were the excuses for Fiji and Hawaii having excessively high power draw and low headroom (aside from GCN 1.0 having good headroom)? Fiji had the benefit of lower-power, super-fast HBM and still couldn't match GM200 in perf/w.
Perhaps, as many have been saying over and over again, with Nvidia's R&D budget climbing higher than AMD's 3+ years ago, and with Nvidia having fewer projects in development, perhaps it's just a matter of AMD having less resources to spec, build, test, rebuild, retest, etc. than Nvidia and that is coming to full fruition before our very eyes. Chips are getting harder to build and AMD is spending less on R&D.... hmmm.....