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Comment by cuteaussie | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there have been unrealistic expectations of Vega compared to the expectations of how Ryzen was going to perform. Most people expected Ryzen to do ok but still loose to Intel by a 2 generation gap and here we are at what 5-10% behind Skylake/Kaby lake refreshes. With Vega everyone wants it to beat the gtx 1080ti but at best we might get something in between a 1080 and 1080ti for less money which isn't a fail in my views. The waiting however has sucked and has forced a lot of people to go team green who otherwise wouldn't of had too.

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That combined with the fact that all new AMD GPU's (580 570 480 470) are out of stock literally EVERYWHERE (more recent issue) a lot of people bought nvidia GPU's

Have to +1 that. The current AMD GPU simply cannot be ordered, and that's not a unique occurrence specific to this release.

GTX 1070s are often sold out as well, they're popular for mining too. You can only buy lower end GTX 1050 Ti / RX 560 stuff or the 1080/1080 Ti.

1060s are back in stock. It's specifically only the 1070 that is problematic at this point, and you can actually find them although they do sell out pretty quick.

However both 1060s and 1080s have yet to return to their pre-bubble prices and are hanging out close to MSRP again.

The issue is 1080 is 1.5 years old.

And more power efficient to boot.

When is NVIDIA next gen due ?

Either later this year or early next year depending on which rumor site you choose to believe.

I've even heard rumors that early next year will be the Quadros and Teslas, gaming cards in late next year.

Volta V100 is already on sale in NVLINK/DGX form factor, they've been handing out the PCIE to researchers for a while now during events and it will go on sale in about a month.

Will Intel buy NVIDIA ? Stay Tuned !

They can't afford them.

Comedy option: Intel makes the offer and Jen-Hsun demands to be CEO of the resulting company again.

(for those not in the know: AMD made an offer to buy out NVIDIA a decade ago, and it fell through for that reason, NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang demanded to be CEO of the resulting company. The funny thing is that he would have been a much better CEO than Dirk Meyer or Hector Ruiz, but Ruiz was not about to give up his CEO seat. AMD ended up buying ATI instead.)

Double comedy option: Intel agrees to it.

Now, what would be the name of the new company ? nvintel ? intellidia ?

Nah, you're missing the obvious here. Now that AMD has THREADRIPPA and EPYC, the way has been cleared for other 90s-gamer-chic names.

The merger of Intel and NVIDIA would obviously result in a company literally named "Chipzilla".

They partner with rapper DMX for a new promotion for their next series of Extreme Edition chips, Jen-Hsun walks onstage to the tune of "-X gonna give it to ya". As a snub to the Vega t-shirts, everyone in the audience receives a free Coffee Lake-X leather jacket.

Yeah but with 64 pcie lanes and vulkan, that 1080i, and even 2 in SLI, is starting to look a bit old fashion. I think amd is actually ahead of the paradigm shift

How are VEGA different from the 1080 in this regard ? they're designed with more parallelism in mind ?

Vulkan was based on an API design by AMD but that doesn't mean it works better with AMD hardware. From Mantle to Vulkan there has been many small changes to make it perform optimally in pretty much all modern GPU architectures.

The 1080ti has absolutely no competition from AMD in terms of performance/power and availability for most workloads; calling it "old fashioned" is... out of touch. And Nvidia is already on the move with Volta, which AMD will seemingly have zero answer for. They're running circles around themselves at this point.

If anything, Ryzen's increased PCIe lanes are a reason to go for nvidia. You can get Threadripper and mobo at a much smaller cost than a Xeon rig, with more lanes, but just load it with Pascal GPUs. And they'll have better performance, power, and be easier to buy than any Vega card. This would do quite well for a deep learning machine, for example.

The place Vega has advantages are in more niche areas, like open source Radeon drivers, fully unlocked FP16 support (garbage market segmentation from Nvidia), and the Instinct/SSG GPU lines they'll be offering will be unique. And they're definitely cheaper, for sure. (But unless AMD can back it up with software, it won't mean much, especially for markets like deep learning, which NVidia is going full-force.)

I remember a time where AMD and ATI were not one company and the latter was always head-to-head with NVidia. At which point did mediocrity spread from AMD?

> At which point did mediocrity spread from AMD?

Based on the benchmarks, the $500 AMD Ryzen 7 matches the performance of the $1723 Intel i7 6950x.

Is this what you call mediocre? Getting the same performance for less than 1/3 of the price is being mediocre nowadays?

GGP specifically addressed this, no? Broadwell is ~two releases behind (and if you're explicitly looking at an Intel -E chip for cost comparison.... that doesn't make an awful lot of sense given that their E lines are basically always sky high prices compared to other Intel chips).

> GGP specifically addressed this, no? Broadwell is ~two releases behind

That's entirely irrelevant. It doesn't matter if those processors were released last year of in the last century. It's Intel's current and best offer, and the facts speak for themselves: AMD's current offering matches Intel's perfomance while trouncing Intel's in price/performance ratio.

> that doesn't make an awful lot of sense given that their E lines are basically always sky high prices compared to other Intel chips).

That's Intel's problem. It makes no sense to try to downplay AMD's stellar performance just because Intel does some major price gouging.

I have a Ryzen 1700 in the desktop I built at new job, it's performance per £ is simply staggering.

It's the first time since I got my first i5 (2500K) from an AMD64-3000 I've genuinely been staggered by performance and the desktop at my previous job was an OC'd 3570K.

Frankly the Ryzen 1700 is incredible, so much so I'm already planning on building a similar machine for home.

All that said though I'm also really impressed with the i7-7700K in the new laptop, the amount of processing power intel has shoved into a laptop is impressive as well.

Competition is good, it will be interesting to see what the mobile Ryzen's are capable off.

> I have a Ryzen 1700 in the desktop I built at new job, it's performance per £ is simply staggering.

I can confirm that, I bought a new desktop PC with a 1700 for home use around Easter, and on CPU-bound workloads with sufficient parallelism (e.g. video encoding), that thing is just insanely fast.

It's a bit of a shame, really, that most of the time it just sits there doing almost nothing. ;-)

Better to have it and not need it then need it and not have it.

I hammer mine though and it handles it with complete aplomb.

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