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Radeon-Vega

A little over two years ago, AMD appear that it would restructure its loftier-stop GPU development team. This new unit, dubbed the Radeon Technologies Group, would be led by senior vice president Raja Koduri. While RTG was never an contained spin-off or subsidiary, it enjoyed a fair caste of autonomy and concentrated AMD driver evolution, developer relations, GPU pattern, and GPU architectures all nether the same unit of measurement. This was a departure from the previous organization, in which AMD has substantially unified its APU, CPU, and GPU teams. RTG, we were told, would exist the vehicle AMD needed to deliver a best-in-class part that could compete with anything Nvidia had to offer. At present, Raja has announced he's leaving AMD (he had been on sabbatical for the by 40 days).

RajaAMD

Hexus obtained a copy of the memo Koduri sent to other members of the RTG grouping. In it, he thanks his co-workers for their hard piece of work and dedication to a hard two-year period and specifically mentions both Lisa Su and Marking Papermaster for the trust they extended to him in forming and backing RTG in the first place.

An Unsurprising Departure

On the one hand, this news is no surprise; nosotros've heard rumors Raja might be leaving for several weeks at present. But the other reason information technology's not surprising is considering both Polaris and Vega accept struggled to match Nvidia'southward ain GPUs. Now, keep in mind, the lead time on GPU designs is quite long. AMD was working on Polaris long before they announced it in tardily 2015; Vega's design would've likely been underway past then too. AMD's RX 400 series was solid and reasonably well positioned, if non a knockout, but the RX 580 only managed to increase its functioning past burning a corking deal more power. Boosting the RX 580's clocks brought it more in line with the GTX 1060, just power efficiency remained elusive.

Vega 56 and Vega 64 accept a similar problem. By the fourth dimension the cards were ready for market place, Nvidia'due south Pascal had been out for 15 months. In ordinary circumstances, one might reasonably expect AMD to (pardon the pun) piledrive Nvidia. But that'due south not what happened. Instead, the Vega 56 established itself as a somewhat faster GPU compared with the GTX 1070, while Vega 64 lags a bit backside the GTX 1080.

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Data by Tech Study

This is certainly better than having no high-end GPU at all, and Raja deserves credit for delivering a part that does compete reasonably well, given that a price drop is all AMD would actually need to sell a much better performance-per-dollar ratio than Nvidia'south higher-stop cards. AMD took a beating for years over its erratic frame timing compared with Nvidia, but Vega reviews accept shown that this problem is largely in the past. In some cases, AMD cards are actually smoother. Merely once again, expectations were extremely high for Vega, and the GPU didn't deliver the knockout punch that investors and enthusiasts expected.

We've long speculated that HBM2'due south difficult ramp may have played a role in this, merely ultimately information technology doesn't matter. Vega may be a contender, just it wasn't a knock-out. It's an architecture AMD can build on (and is edifice on, given the contempo bargain with Intel), simply it didn't vault AMD dorsum into the driver's seat.