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AMD Unveils Radeon RX Vega Series Consumer Graphics Cards Starting At $399 (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: AMD has officially lifted the veil on its new Radeon RX consumer graphics line-up, featuring the company's next-generation Vega GPU architecture. Initially, there are four cards in the Radeon RX Vega line-up, the standard air-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64, a Radeon RX Vega 64 Limited Edition with stylized metal fan shroud, the liquid-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid, and the lower-cost Radeon RX Vega 56. At the heart of all Radeon RX Vega series cards is the Vega 10 GPU which is comprised of roughly 12.5 billion transistors and is manufactured using a 14nm FinFET LPP process. Vega 10 can reliably reach the 1.7GHz range, whereas AMD's previous gen Fiji hovered around 1GHz. The base GPU clock speed of the air-cooled Vega 64 is 1,247MHz with a boost clock of 1,546MHz. There is 8GB of HBM2 memory on-board that offers up peak bandwidth of 484GB/s. All told, the Radeon RX Vega 64 is capable of 25.3 TFLOPs (half-precision) of compute performance. The Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid-Cooled Edition has the same GPU configuration, but with higher base and boost clocks -- 1,406MHz and 1,677MHz, respectively. The lower cost Radeon RX Vega 56 features the same Vega 10 GPU, but 8 of its CUs have been disabled and its clocks are somewhat lower. Although AMD touts a number of efficiency improvements, the Vega RX series requires some serious power. Vega 56 board power is in the 210 Watt range, while the top-end liquid-cooled card hits 345 Watts. AMD claims top-end Vega cards will be competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 series of cards. AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards are expected to ship on August 14th.
Your analysis of bulldozer and core2 are made almost entirely of "alternative facts". Yes, bulldozer was a bad idea, but it wasn't because AMD tried to copy netburst. Yes, Core2 was a good platform, but intel didn't implement most of the AMD64 platform until nehelem, and as such their memory throughput was much worse until then. Instead, Core2 was a bigger cache, dual core version of Pentium M (which was mostly a reworked P3). Intel didn't even have to match the architecture efficiency of Athlon64 to compete in that era, mostly because memory throughput wasn't super important and the better fabrication facilities and compiler cheats got them better performance numbers without it.
AMD can be faulted for pushing more cores with less pipelines in a time where pipelines became increasingly important. They can't be faulted for intel bribing OEM's into not buying superior AMD products for the 10 years prior to bulldozer. How can AMD be expected to push hard hitting ideas and hire the best engineers when the dominant competitor is ruining their business?
Ironically, it seems that after spending 6 years behind Intel performance AMD was still able to pull a miracle by outmaneuvering intel with Ryzen.
I will agree about Polaris; AMD "forgot" to create a top-level part for the 480/580 generation, and their sales hurt for it a lot. Steam hardware index shows the 480/580 well behind the 1060 in sales even though prior to the recent mining valuations they were a much better value. Like in the car market, people like to buy the brand that they perceive as being the best (even if they can't afford that model). How many people would be buying Cadillac ATS's or BMW 330's if neither company made their M5's or CTS-Vs?