AMDGPU Open-Source Driver Code Continues Maturing

[GreatEmerald]

... If you're trying to understand what is going on under the hood, ignoring the marketing names is an important first step

Well said!

To be fair, the marketing names are useful, just that they serve a different purpose. To be exact, they're like benchmarks of the currently available graphics card lineup: you can tell that a 250 is generally slower than a 255, which in turn is slower than a 260 etc. This avoids the issue where you're left wondering if a 260 is slower or faster than a 355: the 260, if still manufactured, is rebranded to either 350 or 355X.

[duby229]

To be fair, the marketing names are useful, just that they serve a different purpose. To be exact, they're like benchmarks of the currently available graphics card lineup: you can tell that a 250 is generally slower than a 255, which in turn is slower than a 260 etc. This avoids the issue where you're left wondering if a 260 is slower or faster than a 355: the 260, if still manufactured, is rebranded to either 350 or 355X.

That makes sense, But It doesn't hold true in all cases. There are a handfull of counter examples to that.

I don't have a problem with rebranding, but I do think branding should be related to the actual die used and not some imaginary performance metric that doesn't really exist.

EDIT: AMD tried performance metrics as branding on their CPU's and in the K6 case it blew up in their face. In K8s case it wasn't at all realistic, it was entirely imaginary.

[Deavir]

That makes sense, But It doesn't hold true in all cases. There are a handfull of counter examples to that.

I don't have a problem with rebranding, but I do think branding should be related to the actual die used and not some imaginary performance metric that doesn't really exist.

EDIT: AMD tried performance metrics as branding on their CPU's and in the K6 case it blew up in their face. In K8s case it wasn't at all realistic, it was entirely imaginary.

Complaining to the driver engineers about the marketing department is kinda cruel. That being said I agree it is hard to figure out what to buy without researching first. Though I can't think of a company makes it as easy as I would like.

[duby229]

Complaining to the driver engineers about the marketing department is kinda cruel. That being said I agree it is hard to figure out what to buy without researching first. Though I can't think of a company makes it as easy as I would like.

They have more influence then I have. A lot more.

Really I just think AMD needs to get everybody in that company together all on the same page. That includes naming conventions regardless of department. Obviously the guys who designed the hardware is more qualified to create naming conventions than some marketing guy.

[bridgman]

That being said I agree it is hard to figure out what to buy without researching first. Though I can't think of a company makes it as easy as I would like.

We make it pretty easy IMO (except for APU part numbers, but at least they tend to be pretty well explained in the online media) :

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2

Obviously the guys who designed the hardware is more qualified to create naming conventions than some marketing guy.

Remember that engineering and marketing (and philosophers) have different goals:

That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

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[duby229]

Remember that engineering and marketing (and philosophers) have different goals:


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Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The marketing departments goals need to be seriously reconsidered. We're talking about the same marketing department who's goal has been to hurt their own company. Remember Barcelona? Or Bulldozer? (They were marketing failures of epic proportions. Both of them as a result of naming conventions and overhype.)

There hasn't been a new major product release since Rory Read reorganized. So maybe it's already been done, and I just haven't seen it yet. I don't know.

[jrch2k8]

is called Zen and i think is for 2017 or something like that, was on anandtech some days ago. From where i see it AMD GPU division is doing just fine and GCN was a really good design and probably will be for 2 more iterations until Pascal reach market(if all the hype is actually true) but AMD need some serious nitro nuclear boost in the CPU side, i don't expect Zen will be even close to Broadwell next gen intel CPU's but if they jumpstart their IPC enough to compete with Ivy Bridge at lower prices then we can expect those to sell as hot bread since most people don't need the uber high end CPUs

[GreatEmerald]

That makes sense, But It doesn't hold true in all cases. There are a handfull of counter examples to that.

That's why I said "generally". Due to engineering differences getting in the way (figures!), in some workloads cards with lower numbers are faster. But only in some workloads.

And while here we care more about features than speed, thus would prefer to see the codenames instead of the marketing names, for the general user the marketing names are more useful, because they usually don't care about the engineering technology.

[duby229]

That's why I said "generally". Due to engineering differences getting in the way (figures!), in some workloads cards with lower numbers are faster. But only in some workloads.

And while here we care more about features than speed, thus would prefer to see the codenames instead of the marketing names, for the general user the marketing names are more useful, because they usually don't care about the engineering technology.

Well for that matter most users don't know or care what GPU is in their computer. The only naming conventions that actually matter to anyone is the engineering conventions. Almost all people buy their PC without ever knowing what a GPU is. That's why Intel GPU's have more than half marketshare. Very few people know any better.

The marketing conventions only exist to confuse people that already know.

[drSeehas]

We make it pretty easy IMO (except for APU part numbers, but at least they tend to be pretty well explained in the online media) :

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2 ...

Unfortunately this isn't complete at all.
E. g. where are the R5 2xx Evergreen and R5 2xx Northern Islands? Any HD 8xxx? All the R2 to R7 of Mullins/Beema/Kaveri/Carrizo-L?