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On the final day of Computex 2017 Luke Hill and Leo Waldock put their heads together to discuss the highlights and low points of the show. Today's topics are AMD Threadripper CPU and Vega GPU. Spoiler alert: the boys cannot wait to get to grips with this new hardware.
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AMD Ryzen 5 and 7 have proven to be superb CPUs and we have high hopes for Threadripper. Getting our hands on X399 motherboards and learning (slightly) more about Threadripper has raised our hopes and expectations. Intel Core i9 looks interesting but Threadripper could mark a new direction for AMD that is as radical as the original Opteron.
Balanced against that, we are still waiting for any useful information about desktop RX Vega graphics for gamers. Yes, AMD has announced the professional Vega Frontier Edition but RX Vega won't launch until Siggraph in July and who knows how long we will have to wait until we can see the hardware in action. The anticipation and frustration are increasing daily.
KitGuru says: Threadripper and Vega have got us wound up tighter than a coiled spring. We want the 16-core monster as soon as possible and hope against hope that Vega can take the fight to GTX 1080. Oh yes, Ryzen Mobile also looks promising.
They should release the enthusiast card in blue, I think the Blue you’re looking for is another launch date ‘BLEW’.
After seeing Micron announcing GDDR6 at 16gbps+ next year is HBM2 going to be relevant before it even launches?
After seeing AMD running its Demo using Crossfire does that inspire any confidence in its single card performance?
Will HBM2 cause the card to be prohibitively expensive for the high end models?
Will it be a paper launch in July trickling down to cards in consumers hands for Sept/Oct, round about the time I’ll be buying a Scorpio hopefully.
Still more questions than answers so I bought a GTX1080. Now I can start saving for Thread Ripper, though that name sounds like something I do on a Sunday morning after a few pints of Black Sheep and a Vindaloo.
850$ 16 core Threadripper
Re HBM being expensive. That’s mainly due to economy of scale imo. Pretty much every card on the market uses GDDR5. SK Hynix and Samsung are pumping out literally thousands upon thousands of the things which pretty much just drop into manufacturers existing design architecture. Therefore cheap and easy to work with.
HBM has only been equipped to the Fury cards and and Nvidia’s P100, which make up only a tiny percentage of the overall market. They require a completely different mounting process (interposer) and interface design for the GPU. So low volume experimental tech is always going to be expensive and granted there will always be additional costs for the complexity of the memory and the interposer.
If they (AMD, nVidia, SK Hynix, etc) can get enough volume production, they can minimise those costs, improve yields, develop better production methods and such.
Besides which, the idea of a tiny little gaming pc powered by a HBM equipped APU really tickles my fancy.
AMD bless them have created such a mess, launching HBM2 on a card that looks as though its going to be as powerful as a 1080 is such a waste, I hope I’m wrong and that’s why it keeps getting delayed but why else would they demo 2 cards in Crossfire. I think if the card had been ready at the same time as the 1080 it would have been a killer but when Nvidia then pushed the Titan then the Ti then another Titan it left AMD with a woefully underpowered card and the only saving grace they could possibly have left is price, but HBM2 isn’t cheap. I mean that’s just my thoughts and most of the stuff I think is bullshit but I waited and waited for Vega until it just didn’t make sense to wait any longer and yes I feel guilty for buying green : (
They used 2 cards because it was a CPU femo and they wanted to show it wasn’t bottlenecking 2x highend cards.
Ahhh I stand corrected, thankyou for replying that completely slipped my mind. Upvoted.