AMD Appears To Be Spinning Another Oland-Based GPU

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Appears To Be Spinning Another Oland-Based GPU

AMD's Rx 300 series line-up is largely a re-brand (with greater vRAM) of older GCN graphics cards, except for the high-end Fiji GPUs. While there's already some low-end parts in the R5/R7 300 series, it seems another one may be coming...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Oland-PCI-ID-Add

[Kemosabe]

Oh god ... i really do hope AMD is not dying.

[duby229]

I just don't see it as a problem. If you guys knew what was really going on then you'd agree with me. Everybody bins their chips. The cost of fabrication means the more bins the better. And having a chip on the market for 2 years is not that big a deal. It is true that their are newer chips available, but if that's what you want then buy one of them instead. Even if you do those are available in multiple bins too. It would be stupid if they didn't bin their chips.

I can understand misgivings about the model numbers assigned, but everybody does the same thing regardless of how they market it.

[jakubo]

seriously? cant you just cripple fiji to 1/4 or less and sell it as low end instead of selling "old crap"? its highly misguiding and inconvenient to customers to make a long search for actually new GPUs - that only exist as power hungry monsters. there are no actually new low end GPUs from AMD. only rebrands. Maybe im wrong, but why should people adapt GPU capabilities from GCN 1.2 when the numbers of these cards are kept low by selling OLD hardware? can someone please break it down for me? it doesnt seem to make sense...

[duby229]

seriously? cant you just cripple fiji to 1/4 or less and sell it as low end instead of selling "old crap"? its highly misguiding and inconvenient to customers to make a long search for actually new GPUs - that only exist as power hungry monsters. there are no actually new low end GPUs from AMD. only rebrands. Maybe im wrong, but why should people adapt GPU capabilities from GCN 1.2 when the numbers of these cards are kept low by selling OLD hardware? can someone please break it down for me? it doesnt seem to make sense...

GPU's are not about providing capability anymore those days are over, instead it's about providing capacity. Capability will be provided by game engines, capacity will be provided by GPU's. I can understand complaining about the model numbers and I sort of agree with you, but nvidia, intel, imagination, qualcomm and everybody else does the same thing. A stripped down fiji unning dx12 or vulkan would look just like an oland to a game engine.

EDIT: The first Core2 Duo has nearly the same front end as the latest Core I7. They both are capable of running the same software. Dx12 and Vulkan will do the same for GPU's. It no longer matters what capability a GPU provides, only its overall performance and capacity. Two different GPU's that provide the same overall performance are essentially the same even if they are physically different.

EDIT: It's not going to be driver developers that implement capability anymore. Drivers for newer hardware arten't going to provide newer graphics capabilities anymore. A 2 year old card with the same performance as a 2 month old card will have the same capabilities because it will be implemented in the game engines and not the device driver.

[vortex]

seriously? cant you just cripple fiji to 1/4 or less and sell it as low end instead of selling "old crap"? its highly misguiding and inconvenient to customers to make a long search for actually new GPUs - that only exist as power hungry monsters. there are no actually new low end GPUs from AMD. only rebrands. Maybe im wrong, but why should people adapt GPU capabilities from GCN 1.2 when the numbers of these cards are kept low by selling OLD hardware? can someone please break it down for me? it doesnt seem to make sense...

They are selling fiji as fast as they can make them, and nobody knows what the yields are.
It would be silly to cripple a fully working fiji and price it accordingly when they can charge the highest price they can and finally make some profit.

They also have that horrible contract from GF that they MUST use, so, having them make these lower end parts makes sense from that standpoint, and since these aren't meant at people who know what they are buying, they will sell boatloads to OEMs that just care about price.

Then of course you got the other issue, a cut down fiji would be slower than the 290x/390x, and most likely tie 280/380 cards, then the price point of these would be lost.

Finally, if you cut down the volts on GCN, you can have a nice card, with not much power use compared to nvidia, and it will just be much slower. That is why they need to pump so many volts into the chip, to keep them faster.

[duby229]

They are selling fiji as fast as they can make them, and nobody knows what the yields are.
It would be silly to cripple a fully working fiji and price it accordingly when they can charge the highest price they can and finally make some profit.

They also have that horrible contract from GF that they MUST use, so, having them make these lower end parts makes sense from that standpoint, and since these aren't meant at people who know what they are buying, they will sell boatloads to OEMs that just care about price.

Then of course you got the other issue, a cut down fiji would be slower than the 290x/390x, and most likely tie 280/380 cards, then the price point of these would be lost.

Finally, if you cut down the volts on GCN, you can have a nice card, with not much power use compared to nvidia, and it will just be much slower. That is why they need to pump so many volts into the chip, to keep them faster.

I don't think the GPU's are fabricated at GF. I'm pretty certain TSMC is still handling that.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Is every GPU article like 3 to 4 weeks behind every gaming web site? Nothing new.

[gigaplex]

seriously? cant you just cripple fiji to 1/4 or less and sell it as low end instead of selling "old crap"? its highly misguiding and inconvenient to customers to make a long search for actually new GPUs - that only exist as power hungry monsters. there are no actually new low end GPUs from AMD. only rebrands. Maybe im wrong, but why should people adapt GPU capabilities from GCN 1.2 when the numbers of these cards are kept low by selling OLD hardware? can someone please break it down for me? it doesnt seem to make sense...

Fiji requires HBM with an interposer, which is not practical on the low end. Otherwise, I'd agree with you.

[Linuxxx]

What makes y'all think that this is about a discrete GPU?
You know, maybe this is for an upcoming APU?

Speaking of which, can anyone from AMD at least hint if there is a successor in the works for the now more than one year old Athlon APU?
I'm asking because I would like to build a new cheap-ish HTPC and figured that an Athlon APU would be the best fit...
I know You guys probably can't say anything concrete, but if You could at least hint whether AMD has forgotten about the AM1 chipset/platform or not, that would be really appreciated!

Thanks in advance! (Looking at You, Mr. Bridgman!)