[Rumor, Tweaktown] AMD to launch next-gen Navi graphics cards at E3

[DrMrLordX]

40% faster while consuming 40% less power? At least the bar is low eh?

I read it'll have a feature that allows walking on water, but it's buggy and will probably not be enabled until after at least 6 months of driver releases. It'll also turn water into Fine Wine(tm).

 

[railven]

I read it'll have a feature that allows walking on water, but it's buggy and will probably not be enabled until after at least 6 months of driver releases. It'll also turn water into Fine Wine(tm).

Or the feature gets quietly taken to the back of the shed and put out of it's misery. Haha.

 

[Glo.]

Any Navi card that's less than 40% faster at the same price bracket is a fail in my opinion.
$130 Rx570 successor as fast as a 1660ti.
$180 RX580 successor as fast as a gtx1070ti/Vega64,
$300 Vega 56 successor as fast as a gtx1080ti.
$400 Vega 64 successor as fast as a rtx2080 .
a $650 Vega Vll successor faster than a 2080ti early next year.

All with 40% lower power at the same performance tier.

Anything less on 7nm, to me ,is a fail.

This is EXACTLY what I was writing about AMD's brand perception...

GTX 1660 Ti performance level GPU will cost more than 130$.

 

[Stuka87]

Any Navi card that's less than 40% faster at the same price bracket is a fail in my opinion.
$130 Rx570 successor as fast as a 1660ti.
$180 RX580 successor as fast as a gtx1070ti/Vega64,
$300 Vega 56 successor as fast as a gtx1080ti.
$400 Vega 64 successor as fast as a rtx2080 .
a $650 Vega Vll successor faster than a 2080ti early next year.

All with 40% lower power at the same performance tier.

Anything less on 7nm, to me ,is a fail.

nVidia has been incapable of doing this, why do you think AMD can do it?

 

[tajoh111]

nVidia has been incapable of doing this, why do you think AMD can do it?

Happy medium definitely seems to prefer nvidia but the reasoning for this seems to a being a bit vindictive and retaliation of what people expected from turing and how they said it was a fail. E.g people said the rtx 2060 should replace the gtx 1060 for the same money. The rtx 2080 should replace the gtx 1080 for the same money and the gtx 2080 ti should replace the gtx 1080 ti for the same money.

All this with an added spike of 40 percent lower power because of the nodal move to 7nm.

Turing was considered a fail here because of a the performance and the price. People wanted the 35% performance gains turing brought for free compared to last gen. That is chips at the same cost as their predecessor, with the performance being free. This used to be fair when chips didnt grow in size for much like maxwell or when moves to more advanced nodes saved money on chips. But with the increasing cost of transistors(or lack of it) and chips require brute force die size increases, consumers are likely to bare the burden of cost.

AMD is doing this too assuming the 90 dollars price increase of polaris at $330.

90 dollars might not seem like much but it is a 37.5% increase over the $240 over the original rx480. Apply this percentage to pascal cards and you get turing pricing for the most part.

While i agree Nvidia took it too far with founders edition pricing. Considering the lack of competion and the monstrous die size increases, i thought none fe pricing was mostly fair with good pricing being about 100 dollars less at the top end(rtx 2080/2080 ti).

I think happy medium is being spiteful but it is not without its purpose. That is he/she wants Navi to be judged to the same standard as turing was with the added benefit of 7nm being considered. This is tad unfair since nvidia is using monstrous dies to enable performance but the move to 7nm does make these moves possible.

If turing was done on 7nm, the perfomance above would be possible but not the pricing.

 

[Mockingbird]

Any Navi card that's less than 40% faster at the same price bracket is a fail in my opinion.
$130 Rx570 successor as fast as a 1660ti.
$180 RX580 successor as fast as a gtx1070ti/Vega64,
$300 Vega 56 successor as fast as a gtx1080ti.
$400 Vega 64 successor as fast as a rtx2080 .
a $650 Vega Vll successor faster than a 2080ti early next year.

All with 40% lower power at the same performance tier.

Anything less on 7nm, to me ,is a fail.

Then you woke up and realized that it was a very nice dream.

 

[Head1985]

Well 330usd for 1080Ti is nothing special.In past x70 cards around 300-350usd was as fast or up to 20% faster than previous TOP card.
With pascal nv overpriced 1070 for 450usd
2070?Well its just slow overpriced crap compare to other x70 cards like GTX570,670,970.Even far worse than 1070.
If AMD can pull card like GTX970 was they will sell alot.

 

[happy medium]

Then you woke up and realized that it was a very nice dream.

If they don't meet my expectations Nvidia will crush them 6 months after the September Navi release with 7nm Ampere. Just saying. Navi better crush Touring after Touring has been on the market over a year and only on 12nm.

 

[Mockingbird]

If they don't meet my expectations Nvidia will crush them 6 months after the September Navi release with 7nm Ampere. Just saying. Navi better crush Touring after Touring has been on the market over a year and only on 12nm.

You are making a poor assumption that NVIDIA is going to seriously cut prices and throw profit out the window.

 

[Mockingbird]

I don't know why people keep coming here with stupid expectations that AMD would sell products at half (or less) the prices of NVIDIA's.

I expect more modest 10% - 20% off NVIDIA's prices.

 

[coercitiv]

Any Navi card that's less than 40% faster at the same price bracket is a fail in my opinion.
$130 Rx570 successor as fast as a 1660ti.
$180 RX580 successor as fast as a gtx1070ti/Vega64,
$300 Vega 56 successor as fast as a gtx1080ti.
$400 Vega 64 successor as fast as a rtx2080 .
a $650 Vega Vll successor faster than a 2080ti early next year.

All with 40% lower power at the same performance tier.

Anything less on 7nm, to me ,is a fail.

This deserves the best post award for 2019: you simply can't tell if it's genius meta humor or pure hypocrisy. 10/10 Recommend!!!

 

[AtenRa]

If they don't meet my expectations Nvidia will crush them 6 months after the September Navi release with 7nm Ampere. Just saying. Navi better crush Touring after Touring has been on the market over a year and only on 12nm.

RTX 2060 launched in January 2019 and GTX 1660Ti in March 2019. Navi will launch only 6 months after RTX 2060 and GTX 1660Ti.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Or the feature gets quietly taken to the back of the shed and put out of it's misery. Haha.

Oh dear. This feature died for our sins.

I don't know why people keep coming here with stupid expectations that AMD would sell products at half (or less) the prices of NVIDIA's.

I expect more modest 10% - 20% off NVIDIA's prices.

Outside of maybe Polaris, AMD hasn't exactly been discounting their RTG products lately. Mining did skew prices, but even MSRP for Vega 64 (for example) was pretty high at launch. Radeon VII certainly isn't cheap, either.

 

[exquisitechar]

Your expectation are exceeding what AMD can realistically achieve, given that they are not NVidia.

I chuckled.

Outside of maybe Polaris, AMD hasn't exactly been discounting their RTG products lately. Mining did skew prices, but even MSRP for Vega 64 (for example) was pretty high at launch. Radeon VII certainly isn't cheap, either.

They aren't cheap to manufacture, either, and the Radeon VII has its purposes aside from gaming. The problem is simply that Vega can't compete in perf/mm^2. AMD couldn't price Vega to make a decent profit while also significantly undercutting Nvidia because of that. That doesn't have to be the case with Navi. Compared to Turing, I bet it will look like a steal.

 

[RaV666]

I chuckled.

They aren't cheap to manufacture, either, and the Radeon VII has its purposes aside from gaming. The problem is simply that Vega can't compete in perf/mm^2. AMD couldn't price Vega to make a decent profit while also significantly undercutting Nvidia because of that. That doesn't have to be the case with Navi. Compared to Turing, I bet it will look like a steal.

Exactly. Thing with vega was, it was much bigger then 1080 Die, AND ON TOP OF THAT it had HBM2 memory.Really low wiggle room there.
BUT, all turing dies and especially Rtx ones, are big.Tensors and rt cores take as much as 1/3 of the chip.So even if navi still has worse perf/mm2 it doesnt have this mostly useless for now bunch of transistors, so it can be slim.And GDDR6, so they should be able to sell them cheaper than nvidia without much problem.

 

[mattiasnyc]

I don't know why people keep coming here with stupid expectations that AMD would sell products at half (or less) the prices of NVIDIA's.

Same thing with CPUs though, right? People expect a 9900K killer at half that price.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Same thing with CPUs though, right? People expect a 9900K killer at half that price.

AMD DOES have a recent history of undercutting Intel on the CPU side. Especially in 2017 when they hit the 6800k hard at $499. Not sure they'll sell a 5 GHz 8c chip this year for $250, but expect something close . . .

They aren't cheap to manufacture, either, and the Radeon VII has its purposes aside from gaming.

Indeed. It's hard to know what to expect from Navi on the price side given recent history. AMD simply hasn't had a cheap design to sell for awhile, aside for Polaris. And Polaris prices were skewed by mining.

The other thing to consider is available market share. AMD still has a large market to pick up with their CPUs, so aggressive pricing makes a lot of sense. dGPUs are a lower volume business. Yes, they can potentially steal marketshare and mindshare from nVidia. It's a smaller market, though, and it's shrinking. That's one of the many reasons why NV and AMD have been pumping up the price thresholds on their products.

 

[Mockingbird]

AMD DOES have a recent history of undercutting Intel on the CPU side. Especially in 2017 when they hit the 6800k hard at $499. Not sure they'll sell a 5 GHz 8c chip this year for $250, but expect something close . . .



Indeed. It's hard to know what to expect from Navi on the price side given recent history. AMD simply hasn't had a cheap design to sell for awhile, aside for Polaris. And Polaris prices were skewed by mining.

The other thing to consider is available market share. AMD still has a large market to pick up with their CPUs, so aggressive pricing makes a lot of sense. dGPUs are a lower volume business. Yes, they can potentially steal marketshare and mindshare from nVidia. It's a smaller market, though, and it's shrinking. That's one of the many reasons why NV and AMD have been pumping up the price thresholds on their products.

Joel Hruska (ExtremeTech):

There has been a surfeit of what Alan Greenspan might have called "irrational exuberance" surrounding AMD and 7nm technology for both Ryzen and Navi. It appears to be fed by fanboys with no concept of how over-hyping the technology cycle behind a company can lead to fans being angry and even vengeful when AMD "fails" to deliver on promises they never made. Widespread coverage of these rumors can lead to them being treated as facts or near-facts, despite AMD doing absolutely nothing to confirm them.

The basic argument is the same, and goes like this:

1). AMD is about to do something extraordinary.

2). AMD, being run by idiots, will choose to sell their extraordinary new product for roughly half the price as the competition, despite the fact that what AMD needs, more than anything, is stable, long-term profits and strong revenue gain across multiple market shares.

3). Even though the only way to establish #2 is by investing in one's own products and growing revenue, people expect that AMD will starve itself in the name of gaining market share, even though "Lose money on every product and make it up with volume," is not actually a winning move.

4). This practical issue will be solved with chiplets, because chiplets are magic, and 7nm wafers are not more expensive, and design costs have not risen, and AMD is not trying to break into markets like AI and deep learning where Nvidia has an enormous institutional advantage. AMD certainly isn't facing an entrenched competitor like Intel, whose quarterly profits dwarf AMD's by orders of magnitude.

5). The fact that 10nm has slipped so badly is proof that Intel can no longer compete and will slowly be destroyed by ARM and AMD while AMD takes over its market and rules the Earth.

The most annoying thing about all of this is that you could hit "Rewind" and turn the clock back to early 2006. They're basically the same arguments with updated product names (and, of course, the fact that AMD didn't own ATI in early 2006).

I expect AMD to take advantage of 7nm to build a much more competitive Navi than Vega or Polaris have been.I think they will offer a much higher level of performance per dollar and performance per watt. I have not made specific predictions past that because the rumor mill has done a lot of churning about Navi and most of it has been stupid. AMD will not launch an RTX 2070 killer at $250 because AMD isn't going to leave all that money on the table when it desperately needs revenue to fuel its own R&D. AMD wants to play in AI and DL. Nvidia owns those markets so completely, AMD is basically fighting to be a footnote. So clearly, the right solution is to make as much money as possible and plow that back into the business as quickly as possible, in order to build more aggressive AI-focused products on 7nm and steal a march on Nvidia.

Just kidding.

What I meant was, "The smart thing to do is to sell each GPU for one penny above cost, to make the fanboys happy."

(To be absolutely clear, I am not annoyed with you or any commenter specifically. I am tired of chasing down and debunking bad rumors based on dumb data).

I think Navi will be good. I share your concern about how good it will be because AMD has had a hard time securing a straight win against Nvidia in most market segments (the RX 570 is a blowout win against both the GTX 1050 Ti and the GTX 1650, but that's the exception that proves the rule). I think the $330 price tag on an RTX 2070 competitor is probably low, but it's not unbelievably, insanely low. The $250 rumor was.

The rumor mill all-too-often confuses “AMD will make a very competitive / superior play in terms of performance per dollar” with “AMD will gut its own profit margins in the name of offering an unsustainably good deal.”

 

[DrMrLordX]

AMD will not launch an RTX 2070 killer at $250 because AMD isn't going to leave all that money on the table when it desperately needs revenue to fuel its own R&D.

A few points to add to what Joel said:

1). It's likely AMD will hit the $250-$300 price point regardless of how fast is Navi. The reported shader counts seem too low to be competitive with a 2070 even with clocks above 2 GHz. I could be wrong, maybe they will have a Navi product that will perform as well as a 2070. If they do, then it'll be in the Vega56 price range, more likely than not. Something slower will take the place of Polaris' old price point.

2). RTG's cash cow is not on the desktop. It's Radeon Instinct and, next year, the next-gen consoles. Desktop Navi is not likely going to do a whole lot to alter their fortunes economically-speaking. Shrinking market and all that. Selling Navi with razor-thin margins won't necessarily matter all that much, in the grand scheme of things. Not that AMD will do that, mind you.

 

[mattiasnyc]

AMD DOES have a recent history of undercutting Intel on the CPU side. Especially in 2017 when they hit the 6800k hard at $499.

Which AMD CPU and what was the respective prices? The 6800K was not above $450 two years ago according to PartsPicker.

Undercutting is one thing and nobody disputes that. Selling better stuff at half the price is just... something else though...

Not sure they'll sell a 5 GHz 8c chip this year for $250, but expect something close . . .

Well... I really just don't see that happening, at least not an octa core.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Which AMD CPU and what was the respective prices?

1800x. The 6800k was $1k in Feb 2017.

Well... I really just don't see that happening, at least not an octa core.

We will see. Don't be surprised if you see at least one 8c in the $250-$300 range . . . basically in the same price range where I expect to see Navi10. Will it hit 5 GHz out of the box? Probably not. Overclocking may get it there, though. AMD offers a lot more value on CPUs than they do GPUs. Navi probably won't change that much.

 

[Mockingbird]

1800x. The 6800k was $1k in Feb 2017.



We will see. Don't be surprised if you see at least one 8c in the $250-$300 range . . . basically in the same price range where I expect to see Navi10. Will it hit 5 GHz out of the box? Probably not. Overclocking may get it there, though. AMD offers a lot more value on CPUs than they do GPUs. Navi probably won't change that much.

What you don't understand is that it's easy to disrupt the market when you have nothing to lose.

 

[Mockingbird]

1). It's likely AMD will hit the $250-$300 price point regardless of how fast is Navi. The reported shader counts seem too low to be competitive with a 2070 even with clocks above 2 GHz. I could be wrong, maybe they will have a Navi product that will perform as well as a 2070.

How do you know the shader counts?

I don't think this is something AMD has disclosed.

If they do, then it'll be in the Vega56 price range, more likely than not. Something slower will take the place of Polaris' old price point.

As for pricing, don't expect more than 20% off NVIDIA's prices.

GeForce RTX 2070 competitor for $400

GeForce RTX 2060 competitor for $280

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti competitor for $224

 

[DrMrLordX]

What you don't understand is that it's easy to disrupt the market when you have nothing to lose.

No, I understand that. But when AMD launched the 1800x @ $499, margins were still high on that chip - for them . Not by Intel standards, but Intel had (up to that point) a monopoly on performance and brand recognition. AMD went lower on price a year later. They didn't even have a $400 or $500 Pinnacle Ridge. 8c isn't even the top of their stack anymore for Zen2. If AMD sells a 2700x for $330, why wouldn't they sell an 8c Zen2 for $250-$300 when it's going to be sitting in the middle of their product stack?

AMD can't do all those things with Navi. A $250 (or even $300) Navi won't have the same margin as an $500 1800x (for starters), and it probably won't offer the same performance as an NV card costing twice as much, either. It'll knock off the 1660Ti and RTX 2060 - probably. So price it to compete with those and they will have a small win. If they try anything else then they will get creamed.

How do you know the shader counts?

I don't think this is something AMD has disclosed.

I heard 2560 shaders? The 56 CU count rumor for $330 seems unlikely. It's all leaks right now.

GeForce RTX 2060 competitor for $280

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti competitor for $224

The cheapest 1660Ti I can find on moment's notice is $270, and the cheapest 2060 is around $330:

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=438,436&sort=price&page=1

If AMD can beat them both with 2560 shaders for, let's say, $280 as you suggest, they'll be doing alright. Especially if power draw is low. And that would not surprise me at all. A 2070 killer, though? Nahhh, I don't think they'll even launch one yet.

 

[mattiasnyc]

1800x. The 6800k was $1k in Feb 2017.

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10337/81819.png

by Ian Cutress on May 31, 2016 2:01 AM EST