What if.....
V10 is not found anywhere, because what you see in these slides & leaks is V11. (Masked as V10.)
With V10 being held behind some tight lips.
And AMD's respin of Polaris is a market grab maneuver at ultra low costs.
(AMD's version of the 8800GT).
Is that a viable rumor?
It's not a rumor at all until/unless people start spreading it around and talking about it. Up until then, it's an idea.
As for the merit of the idea, it seems unlikely. Why present misleading information in confidential closed-door meetings to high level industry partners? That would seriously erode their trust in the company, even if performance matches up to what's presented. I imagine an AMD datacenter sales rep calling up ... say, Google, and telling them "Oh, remember that awesome Vega 10 GPU that we showed you and that you ordered ten thousand of for your datacenter? Yeah, that was Vega 11, only we didn't want to tell you. Sorry. Vega 10 does exist, and it's even better, we just didn't want to tell you about it. We cool?" That wouldn't go over well.
I mean, there's nobody outside of AMD dictating what their codenames mean, so why on earth make a system and subsequently lie about it? If the purpose was to "hide" Big Vega, that's both a risky and impractical way of doing it. And that could easily be done by naming Big Vega 12. Or 13. Or $$$. Or >9000. Or whatever. They're free to codename their products whatever they want, after all.
Guys,
in your die size estimation, you forgot that Maxwell has 4 times more cache than Kepler (cache used by the tile rasterization), taking out space from pure ALUs count. Vega will be the same thus wont scale linearly its ALUs compared to Polaris...
my 3cts
That makes some sense, and would make up some of the ~100mm2 "missing" between the known photos of Vega 10 and an "upscaled" Polaris 10@64 CUs. 100mm2 is
a lot of cache, though. I guess a combination of bigger caches and bigger CUs?
In light of the above, that does seem to make sense.
Still, the Fury X clocks in at 8.6tflops at 1050MHz. As such, all it would take for it to reach 12tflops would be a clock speed increase to ~1470MHz -
lower than what's rumored for Vega. From the (rather awful) clock scaling of Fiji/GCN (Polaris included) that
would reuqire some architectural changes and not just a better process, but it still means that (given that rumors on CU count and clock speed are accurate) there is
no IPC gain between Fiji and Vega. Which doesn't exactly jive with AMDs statements that one of the biggest focal points for Vega's development is/has been IPC increases.
Unless Vega's NCU contains fewer SPs than previously? So that 64 CUs add up to less than 4096 SPs? That would of course mean better IPC if tflops performance matches "1500MHz Fiji". That sounds odd to me, but on the other hand Fiji is (as mentioned by someone above) a very imbalanced design, with a "throw more CUs at it" approach to performance. Perhaps they found it would make more sense to rebalance the design, give each CU fewer SPs, increasing cache, adding more TUs and ROPs and such to balance out the design more? I don't even remotely know enough about GPU architectures to do more than ask questions about this, but in my head at least it sounds like something isn't adding up.
On the other hand, could some of the arch improvements be specifically focused on increasing gaming/real-time 3D performance per tflops? After all, that's where Nvidia is beating them the most soundly. So the IPC in terms of tflops might be the same, but real-world gaming (and similar) performance might be better?
From what we know of big Vega, it seems as though there will be 3 consumer parts and I think the fill the Fury, Fury X, and Fury Nano categories. I don't know what Vega 11 ends up getting called, but it seems like a mixed lineup almost doesn't make sense. Sure you can call them Vega Fury or something like that to denote the difference between the old and new Fury, or just call it the Vega, Vega X, Vega Nano and drop Fury completely since it isn't something that I think will get a lot of fond memories down the road. At best it was ahead of its time.
That's what I'm thinking too. RX Vega to replace R9 Fury/Nano.
If small Vega is going to take the x90 slot, it seems like the cut version should probably take the x80 slot and relegate Polaris to x70 and below. A few powers speculated that there won't be an X cards since we've moved from R9 to RX and at some point, it adding more X's just gets ridiculous. No idea how to work Vega into the name without it getting cumbersome though.
Here I have to disagree with you. While adding infinite Xes does get silly at some point, AMD traditionally keeps the same chip on the same numbered tier. As such, it would make sense for Vega 11 to be the RX 590 and 590X (perhaps they'll add some other "step-up" signifier? Revive the "Pro" moniker? That would create confusion with the Radeon Pro lineup, though. Hm), rather than 580 and 590. (Even if I on principle agree that renaming a clock-bump chip refresh on the same naming level a year later is a bad tactic. An RX 480 refresh should be the 570 for it to make any sense.)
Personally, I think it would be cool if they dropped numbers with Vega and played more into the astronomy side of things. Big Vega gets designated as Vega Black Star or something like that. It's a little bit like a Black Edition throwback in a way. So Vega Black Star, Vega Black Star X, and Vega Black Star Nano for the big Vega Cards. Below that the smaller Vega 11 can be labeled Red Star and Red Star X to denote cut and full chips. If you need another rung for an even smaller die, just pick another color like blue or white.
Oh god. Please don't, AMD.
"AMD Radeon RX Vega Black Star X (16GB edition)"?
"Sapphire Radeon RX Vega Black Star X 16GB Nitro+"?
"MSI Radeon RX Vega Black Star X 16GB Gaming X OC"?
"Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX Vega Black Star X 16GB OC"?
No. Thank. You.
They've already established a high-end naming scheme with the Fury series: Radeon R(x) (Product name) (X). No reason to change that after just one generation.
Not to meniton: If they're to stick to the astronomical naming, at least suggest things that exist (such as Polaris, Vega and Navi ...). Red/white/brown dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, red/yellow/blue giant/supergiant. Plenty to pick from. Or are you suggesting they start a naming scheme based on David Bowie song and album titles? I for one would rather buy a Radeon RX Rebel Rebel or Radeon RX Dancing In The Street than an RX Vega Black Star. Maybe an SFF version called Radeon RX Space Oddity? A really great blower cooler on the Radeon RX Wild is the Wind? A business lineup called Radeon Black Tie White Noise? I think we might be on to something here.