But I really hope I'm wrong and they kick Nvidia ass since they become such intolerable arrogant anti-competitive pricks in the last +10 years.
Fast forward to 2020 and the perception about AMD's video driver quality seems to be in a similar place: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/radeon-big-navi-driver-issues-f.... This may just be confirmation bias since there are also articles refuting that AMD still has driver issues.
On the gripping hand AMD themselves apparently acknowledge they have issues and are trying to address them . https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-drivers-update-downloa...
Maybe for Windows, but the same cannot be said of Linux or macOS, where AMD's choice to open-source their drivers has led to these OSes having great support; while Nvidia, having to support their own closed-source drivers, seemingly hasn't had the bandwidth to get their drivers for these OSes up to par.
Passmark below:
3400G: 9425
3600: 17850
for fun
1600: 12444
I applaud the open source effort, but let's not pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows.
Also, as the owner of Macbook 16" with a Radeon 5500M Pro, I'll add that I find the bootcamp drivers much subpar. They're also rarely updated although the issue seems to be Apple there.
I switched to an RX560 and I couldn't be happier. Linux drivers that actually work and aren't a mostly closed source garbage heap. The current Windows drivers are fine too.
I've not had much luck on laptops with NVIDIA Optimus though, maybe that's improved.
The current situation with Wayland and EGLStreams is regrettable though.
The fact Nvidia hasn't sold their slots to AMD for CPU production, yet AMD's GPU team has given up slots to their CPU team, tells you Nvidias GPU range is more profitable than AMD's one in this high-end market.
Your second assertion that they can make more money from a CPU wafer than a GPU is probably correct, but assuming they don't abandon the GPU market entirely, they will still be using fab capacity to produce GPUs.
If they're using limited slots for GPUs anyway, doesn't it make sense to focus on the high-end high-margin parts first?
If they can land a decent GPU that’s between the 3080 and 3090 for an affordable price people will buy it.
They don’t need to beat the 3090 to win, I think that ship has sailed, let Nvidia have the high end market, there’s still plenty of space in the midrange, low end to succeed.
Why does a GPU use PCI-Express still? I understand why they used to use it, but now they are not only standard, but in some cases the most important part of a PC.
I feel like if we could break the basic components out of the card, and bring it closer the system with a more modular design a bunch of things would be better.
Wouldn't it be nice if I could choose more CUDA cores if that's what I needed? Wouldn't it be nice if I could add more dedicated video RAM? Wouldn't it be nice if the the PCI slot wasn't a bottleneck? They're not graphics cards any more... often enough they're used for AI and scientific computing. It feels to me like moving these pieces to the motherboard would be super beneficial. Plus eaiser for other companies to get their fingers in things.
How would you achieve any of that? The single meaningful difference between data rates in normal DDR memory and GDDR is that the latter is designed for signaling where the chips are soldered directly on a pcb with very short traces, whereas the former is designed to accommodate the longer distances and narrower buses necessitated by having socket connections.
Any hypothetical new GPU connector would still have to have the memory soldered on the same board as the GPU. (Or, if you are going for the more advanced packaging methods, connected through an interposer or EMIB or something.)
> Why does a GPU use PCI-Express still?
Because PCI-Express is basically the best anyone can do. It has been rapidly evolved to the point where in the past there was a lot of win by using custom busses, but now everyone just uses PCIe because it's the best available. (And I mean everyone, almost all of the remaining custom buses used in high-performance workloads are basically PCIe with a few restrictions loosened.)
Basically the only way you can go up from PCIe is to go wider. And if you do that, what you will likely to do is to make a LGA or PGA style socket format, that talks PCIe.
PCIe is the fastest I/O mechanism in computers these days.
> I feel like if we could break the basic components out of the card, and bring it closer the system with a more modular design a bunch of things would be better.
GDDR6 and HBM2 RAM cannot be broken out. GDDR6 requires you to solder the RAM directly onto the board, while HBM2 RAM requires an interposer with 4096 individual wires connecting the HBM2 stacks to the GPU.
> more modular design a bunch of things would be better.
Its very difficult to make a "modular" set of 4096 wires (HBM2). Or a "modular" set of GDDR6x (which is now using 4-bits per clock cycle per pin, thanks to PAM4: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15978/micron-spills-on-gddr6x...)
The quality of the connections requires direct soldering in the case of GDDR6x, or incredibly specialized packaging in the case of HBM2. These RAM architectures, while incredibly fast, are almost impossible to extend.
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> It feels to me like moving these pieces to the motherboard would be super beneficial.
Xeon Phi tried to do that, and it failed. I'm not entirely sure what you expect to gain from moving the GPU closer to the center of the motherboard.
Again: high-speed RAM trades flexibility for high-performance. So any GPU using the high-speed RAM like HBM2 or GDDR6 will be stuck at very limited configurations.
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DDR4 and DDR5 are an order of magnitude less bandwidth, but their ability for multiple configurations is what makes the motherboard even possible.
Remove the ability to buy more or less RAM per computer, and what do you have? You just have a graphics card. Its not like you'll be able to pipe information from your hard drives or SSDs faster than a PCIe pipe anyway.
You see this effect in other things too, such as Intel NICs being able to place packets directly in L3 cache because avoiding main memory is such a huge win (for both bandwidth and latency reasons):
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/data-direct-i-o-t...
Nvidia's 3000 series will support it, the new consoles have it one form or another, and we can safely presume AMD's 6000 series will support it as well.
Under Windows, obviously. Linux will be a completely different bucket of chum.