Come right in and close the door, sit down, put your thinking cap on and listen.
First of: -The Radeon Pro SSG has a literal terabyte of storage -The Vega "cache controller" supports 512TB address space -crossfire/multi-gpu support gets more advanced with Vulkan
What I make of that: There will be multi-card setups where each card in a system has a different function. One provides fast storage, another card(s) calculates/renders
How likely would this be from a hardware & software standpoint?
thats already possible from software level; not much on hardware side - hardware was always able to achieve that. Not many people use it like that. (3dsmax provides nice toolset for exactly what you described.)
The SSG cards have expandable storage/memory. (we might see additional memory/storage cards for expansions that would work in some kind of CrossFire setup)
It's already overhyped... The FuryX still have impressive on paper numbers... Still the performance lacks. On that note, what AMD have shown, performance wise, is that Vega outperform 1080 in doom with Vulcan... FuryX is some 4-5 fps behind 1080 at 4k, so Vega doesn't look that impressive at all... Yeah, technology wise it's a monster, better looking than any Nvidia 10 series card, but the performance... I'm not hyped. I'm sorry, I love and, but I am not hyped at all... Zen looks way more promising than Vega. Why? Because they showed multiple benchmarks and even if that's cherry picked, it is still impressive how much they have improved. Vega on the other hand is not. It's just a bunch of new technologies with scary lack of performance data about it.
It seems solid and a next step in technology. It in the end comes down to price vs performance. If they get the pricing rite people will buy it and nvidia has to compete.
I dont think Vega will be a titan killer. AMD seem to target what people need more than bleeding edge. I hope it works out for them.
I just hope AMD brings back a 1/4th or 1/2th Double-Precision card back to the desktop. The Fury cards (and RX 480) did 1/16th FP64, while some previous AMD card's did far better. To put it in perspective, the old and aged 7970 has better FP64 performance than the Fury X. I think this is somewhere AMD could really gain some pro market space, as Nvidia has now made good FP64 performance a Tesla tier feature. Pascal Gtx and Quadro cards are 1/32 FP64, which is trash. Tesla p100 is 1/2 FP64 though, which is monstrous. The only competitor AMD has to Tesla P100 right now is the old, Hawaii based Firepro W9100, which does half the compute performance of the P100.
The redeeming part of this is that AMD actually could undercut Nvidia to bring a really strong double precision card to market. The P100 is only available through OEM streams right now. You can't really buy them right now, so if AMD could beat them to the punch with a similarly-performing FP64 card, that'd be huge.
Right because 7970 didn't aim for the 680, the 290x didn't aim for the Titan original, and the Fury X didn't aim for Titan X original and 980 Ti. AMD really does have a track record of not aiming their top tier gpu for Nvidia's top end card.
The only reason AMD doesn't have a competitor with Gtx 1080 and Titan X(P) out right now is because their development was behind Nvidia's. Vega is shooting
I was talking about now not historically when they where matched. AMD fell over and Nvidia has ran away and taken over. I dont think there planning on toe to toe at the top end $1k+ GPU and $1k+ CPU gaming bracket for now.
Dr. Lisa Sue talking last year when the development of Zen and Fury was going on about how AMD can't be the budget option anymore in the CPU or GPU space:
We are absolutely going to invest in high-performance x86.
It can't just be that we're the cheaper solution
Sounds like they've really focused on those budget products. Yes they're probably not going to be charging $1000-1200 for a Ryzen or Vega product, but they're definitely not aiming for anything less than top tier performance and competition. They benchmarked Summit Ridge against a 6900k and called it out as such, and showed Vega playing 2015 Battlefront in 4k. Really does sound less-than top tier, right?
Their company focus is no longer to under-cut in terms of price and performance. They're stating that bluntly and boldly, and I think thats great. SO, I really doubt their big GPU Vega will shoot for anything less than Gtx 1080 / 1080 Ti.
Does anyone think the memory controller would allow card manufacturers to add an M.2 or DDR3 or 4 slot onto a card?
And to add my .02 : I'm a gamer and since having had Eyefinity from the 5870 and now invested in triple Freesync, I am looking forward to an AMD card that appears to compete with the 1080. For me, the big question will be the price: does it have the bang-for-buck, i.e. perform better than 1080, cost less than 1080.
For professional apps that could make senses and work well. Gaming well it is coded so shitty and pushed out so fast any eligant hardware would miss out.
Hate to say it but games are coded to the worst which is usually some console that are crap :)
M.2 onboard memory is allready a thing. AMD Radeon Pro SSG has that.
While it can be done and is useful for some memory intensive tasks, it is currently expensive and needs software implementation that game developers have a track record of failing at (multi core cpus are not a novelty item anymore...).
Lots of cores, a massive pool for data and a 16x PCI-E BUS to get at it. I take it AMD would use the on board video memory for some type of ultra fast cache. AMD seem to have all the right ingredients for mind blowing performance.
I agree with @psycho_666 . the benchmark they've shown is more like a fury x performance. it wouldnt be that bad if you pair with 8GB HBM vram. lets say 15-20% above fury x performance without drivers optimizations. that would be a killer card if priced correctly.
