Quote Originally Posted by vario View Post
I just want to know, what went wrong with vega, maybe its still fixable.484mm2 chip, on 14nm. Thats a big ass chip with absurd power consumption, and performance nowhere to be found. I mean if they would shrink hawaii and make it bigger a bit faster and give it the same 300W tdp it would be faster. Polaris is more than half the size ! And has slow bandwith.
From my understanding, in the short version, the main problem is that AMD bet big on HBM2 and it back fired.

See below, for more details on the long version: Some info taken from Nvidia's SC15 GPU Tech Theater

On further explaining the next generation GPU architectures and efficiency, Stephen pointed out that HBM is a great memory architecture which will be implemented across Pascal and Volta chips but those chips have max bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s (Volta GPU). Moving forward, there exists a looming memory power crisis. HBM2 at 1.2 TB/s sure is great but it adds 60W to the power envelope on a standard GPU. The current implementation of HBM1 on Fiji chips adds around 25W to the chip. Moving onwards, chips with access of 2 TB/s bandwidth will increase the overall power limit on chips which will go from worse to breaking point. A chip with 2.5 TB/s HBM (2nd generation) memory will reach a 120W TDP for the memory architecture alone, a 1.5 times efficient HBM 2 architecture that outputs over 3 TB/s bandwidth will need 160W to feed the memory alone.
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