Hacker News Reader

Comment by velox_io | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I didn't expect that. Laptops were the only market Intel was still strong, still dominated. Having brought an rx5700 XT recently, the power usage has been just as impressive as the performance. AMD will have some very nice products when they start putting mini RX5000s in their CPUs. Decent performance without discrete GPUs is a real possibility. (Just need add some HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) to the mix and things will get rather interesting!)

View on HN

I bought an RX 5700 XT almost immediately after launch, and I can't say that I've had had much luck with RDNA/Navi. I experienced freezes/crashes in Windows 10 while gaming, and the card's hot, loud, and still unsupported by ROCm for compute on Linux. There are rumours that ROCm won't ever support this generation of Navi and is waiting on Arcturus[1]. The drivers still aren't there and support is limited outside of some gaming use. Reviews also appear relatively mixed on Amazon.

That said, even though perf-per-watt isn't great and that's usually my #1 concern, I still buy primarily AMD GPUs and suffer with the issues, as the NV CUDA/DL monopoly needs a counterweight. I'm just sitting on Vega until Arcturus.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-R...

>RX5700XT almost immediately after launch

So a reference card, which came with an horrendous, insufficient cooling solution.

The experience has been much better for those that bought the custom cards (such as sapphire pulse/nitro) later. They also got far more mature drivers to start with.

I would agree on bad cooling on reference cards. But regarding drivers and general I would not expect a lot of difference between all those cards.

> There are rumours that ROCm won't ever support this generation of Navi and is waiting on Arcturus[1].

I think you're misinterpreting that bit. Arcturus refers to an upcoming product based on their older, pre-Navi Vega microarchitecture. It seems Vega may be a more compute-oriented microarchitecture while Navi is more graphics/gaming-oriented and thus in the near term they are still developing more compute-oriented products based on the Vega microarchitecture. But that doesn't mean they have no plans to ever bring Navi support to ROCm, it just means that it takes less work and has more short-term payoff to add support for another Vega-based product.

I'm expecting decent AMD laptops next quarter, I'm not seeing decent ones now, yet. It's one of the few markets that "is in progress", so it seems.

Mostly because of power consumption, fyi.

You will probably still see mostly intel in expensive (>1000€) gaming laptop but everything else the power consumption of AMD new chips alone should give them the reign until intel can react.

... Until Apple leave Intel. It’s been the eternal rumour but it doesn’t show any sign of dying.

Well, Apple has never been about performance/$ though.

It's the "total package" ;)

My comment talks about specialized gaming laptop series (MSI G-series, ASUS Republic Of Gamers, HP Omen, Acer Predator).

Until AMD releases stable drivers and gains market share, we'll just sit on the porch and buy cheap Intel.

Fleet of BSODing machines because we decided to buy workstation graphics from AMD, I thought they would have figured out drivers by now.

The knee jerk reaction to go and because they finally got closer to closing the gap with Intel is funny to watch but not very forward thinking.

Uhh, have had no problem with the AMD integrated graphics on the twenty or so 2400G I have acquired in the past 6 months. Are you talking Linux ? On windows it works great.

Or if you're talking about dedicated graphics and not integrated, then I don't see how it relates to the subject at hand, their CPUs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com