Radeon Instinct Accelerators Get Ready To Ship

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon Instinct Accelerators Get Ready To Ship

Not only is AMD getting ready to take on Intel in the server space with their just-launched EPYC 7000 series, they are looking to battle NVIDIA now in the GPU server arena. Following their announcement at the end of last year, Radeon Instinct accelerators for GPU compute servers are getting ready to ship...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-Instinct-Accelerators

[FireBurn]

Could they be used for graphics using DRI_PRIME offloading?

[DrYak]

And these cards will probably sell like hotcakes to the GPU crypto-currency mining crowd (which one are GPU minded currently ? Eth, I think ?)
Which will drive up the production and AMD's profit, and down the costs of cards.
Meaning us scientist will also be able to get lower costs for our compute nodes.

(See how China's over investment into Xeon Phi - in their Tianhe super computer ? - drove these card's price down and also helped researcher get them cheaper).

If the designs are close enough to GPUs (exemple : shared PCB, with the difference being only different populations: GPU get HDMI and DP output, Compute cards get ECC chips for memory, etc.) it might also help a bit driving the price down.

(See how the popularity of AMD GPU cores in gaming console helped driving the price a tiny bit down as it was easier to amortize the R&D costs for the core.
Now imagine if the physical chip is the same, and if most of the board is similar : even more costs that can be brought down by sheer scale of mass production).

[mmstick]

And these cards will probably sell like hotcakes to the GPU crypto-currency mining crowd (which one are GPU minded currently ? Eth, I think ?)
Which will drive up the production and AMD's profit, and down the costs of cards.
Meaning us scientist will also be able to get lower costs for our compute nodes.

(See how China's over investment into Xeon Phi - in their Tianhe super computer ? - drove these card's price down and also helped researcher get them cheaper).

If the designs are close enough to GPUs (exemple : shared PCB, with the difference being only different populations: GPU get HDMI and DP output, Compute cards get ECC chips for memory, etc.) it might also help a bit driving the price down.

(See how the popularity of AMD GPU cores in gaming console helped driving the price a tiny bit down as it was easier to amortize the R&D costs for the core.
Now imagine if the physical chip is the same, and if most of the board is similar : even more costs that can be brought down by sheer scale of mass production).

There's no value in these kinds of cards for mining, due to how obscenely costly they are per GFLOP, and anyone buying graphics card for the purpose of mining right now is silly, given that Ethereum will be doing away with the mining concept altogether in a few months.

[coder]

And these cards will probably sell like hotcakes to the GPU crypto-currency mining crowd (which one are GPU minded currently ? Eth, I think ?)
Which will drive up the production and AMD's profit, and down the costs of cards.
Meaning us scientist will also be able to get lower costs for our compute nodes.

These are based on the same die as consumer GPUs, meaning they're already high-volume parts. Anyone who wants a MI6 and doesn't need 16 GB can already buy a consumer-level Polaris GPU, except for the fact that crypto-currency miners are already buying them out of stock.

(See how China's over investment into Xeon Phi - in their Tianhe super computer ? - drove these card's price down and also helped researcher get them cheaper).

That was never a consumer part, so it's plausible that a big customer could impact its economies of scale. This doesn't apply to GPUs, which already sell into the millions and are probably limited by wafer costs.

[coder]

There's no value in these kinds of cards for mining, due to how obscenely costly they are per GFLOP, and anyone buying graphics card for the purpose of mining right now is silly, given that Ethereum will be doing away with the mining concept altogether in a few months.

Background:

http://www.pcgamer.com/blame-cryptocurrency-miners-for-scarcity-of-radeon-rx-580-and-570-cards/

[kiaas]

There's no value in these kinds of cards for mining, due to how obscenely costly they are per GFLOP, and anyone buying graphics card for the purpose of mining right now is silly, given that Ethereum will be doing away with the mining concept altogether in a few months.

Eth has been "a few months until the switch to PoS!" for over a year, it was supposed to be this February even, but there's other cryptos that will be minable even after the switch actually does happen. AMD cards are pretty good at Zcash too, for instance.. but yeah these things are going to be priced too high to matter. the fiji pro duos were briefly "worth considering" price when they were selling for 800 dollars and earning more than the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, but I don't think that's the case now.