Radeon RX Vega Launch Postponed To SIGGRAPH

[boxie]

Small offtopic linguistic question : could you please explain me that expression ? I didn't know it - never heard of it. (I'm not a native english speaker).

Being salty basically means getting angry.

Comes from sailors cussing, being crude and fighting

[mibo]

...
Well, if we want to nig-nag, Q2 will only see the FE version of Vega for professionals, while the consumer market may see the RX Vega in Q3. Q2 was announced and while AMD is somewhat staying to their promise by launching "something" that is Vega, the consumers won't see it within the next 2 months - while wide availability may be even further down the line.

The main problem is HMB2, Vega itself is ready to launch an was probably several months ago. What AMD did with this time is to tweak the chip to up its frequencies from 1000/1200 prototype to 1600 (which isn't bad tbh)

VEGA FE in Q2 - so what?

Do you have insight knowledge? How do you know it is the HMB2 - that AMD isn't selling VEGA to us already?
I see only speculation everywhere. Maybe it's the yield of the gpu, maybe it's the driver? Maybe it's "DC not in the official kernel" :-)

[dungeon]

Being salty basically means getting angry.

Comes from sailors cussing, being crude and fighting

Maybe this video will explain it better

Where mainstream is something that complain because say he does not use more modern guitar and of course because video is not at 8K

[Shevchen]

VEGA FE in Q2 - so what?

Do you have insight knowledge? How do you know it is the HMB2 - that AMD isn't selling VEGA to us already?
I see only speculation everywhere. Maybe it's the yield of the gpu, maybe it's the driver? Maybe it's "DC not in the official kernel" :-)

Well, for me personally I'd enjoy buying Vega right now because my old GPU died and I have to bridge the time with a GPU from the junkyard. But thats only my personal "so what?". ;-)

For the HBM2 problem:
Yes, its all speculation. But its not a speculation, that Hynix changed their portfolio several times, delaying the the release of packages and not mentioning others entirely (like the 8 GB stacks). Now we can just disregard that and carry on, or take it as a hint that Raja also said something like "luckily, HBM2 will be also available from Samsung". Lets say, it fits a certain picture.

That doesn't mean, that on other fronts is not also something in the works. I could totally believe, that AMD has also a lot of work to do on drivers, yes. Yields is something nobody can really comment on - so I don't even want to speculate about that.

Do I have any real insider-information? Nope.

[Jabberwocky]

Before the delays I was very serious about buying Vega, after endless pain with Ryzen and Kaby Lake support in Linux I'm reconsidering it.

Off topic:

Being salty basically means getting angry.

Comes from sailors cussing, being crude and fighting

I have also found this definition on urban dictionary, quora and reddit. From what I can tell it's the oldest and most used. It is not the only usage of the term, many online communities uses this word to describe "cry babies". Going down the rabbit hole further... In South Africa the translated term was also used as offensive statement.

[L_A_G]

This coupled with the fact that the "pro" model has a hard launch date in late June makes me suspect there really is something to the rumors about the availability of HBM memory being particularly poor and the reason behind the delays. HBM2 memory being available from SK Hynix and Samsung (as opposed to HBM1 only being manufactured by SK Hynix) was supposed to ensure good availability, but it seems like that's not really the case here. Instead the limited supplies that are available seem to be focused on making the highest margin products possible.

However there are other potential reasons as well. Back during AMD's last quarterly earnings call they predicted that there's going to be a decent size drop-off in their gross margins for Q2 this this year due to a a ramp-up in the production of the chips for Microsoft's new Xbox coming later this year. If this really is proper volume production and done on Globalfoundries' 14nm node rather than the TSMC nodes they've used on the two previous models of the Xbox One, then I have a feeling it could actually end up putting so much pressure on Globalfoundries' 14nm node that with Ryzen/Epyc/Threadripper and Polaris production in full swing they simply don't have the spare capacity for volume production of Vega. Even if the APU in the new Xbox is again made using a TSMC node it could be that they simply don't have the capacity due to all the CPUs and older generation GPUs they're cranking out.

[eydee]

Vega seems to be hopeless. A few more delays and it'll beat even Fedora, being the most delayed product in history. I'd just get Polaris now, if Polaris was available...

[LeJimster]

I just hope DAL/DC actually gets mainlined this year. My monitor just died so I upgraded to a new freesync monitor that I'm unable to take full advantage of until this work is complete.

I still plan on upgrading to Vega once its released. But was hoping it would have had a product launch by now.. Still... I'm good at waiting by this point.

[Jumbotron]

Not surprised at the news. Well....hopefully we will see further tweakage to the Polaris line during the year. I'd like to see a single slot version of the RX 560 with the power draw of a RX 550 once further node tweaks come online.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

This coupled with the fact that the "pro" model has a hard launch date in late June makes me suspect there really is something to the rumors about the availability of HBM memory being particularly poor and the reason behind the delays. HBM2 memory being available from SK Hynix and Samsung (as opposed to HBM1 only being manufactured by SK Hynix) was supposed to ensure good availability, but it seems like that's not really the case here. Instead the limited supplies that are available seem to be focused on making the highest margin products possible.

However there are other potential reasons as well. Back during AMD's last quarterly earnings call they predicted that there's going to be a decent size drop-off in their gross margins for Q2 this this year due to a a ramp-up in the production of the chips for Microsoft's new Xbox coming later this year. If this really is proper volume production and done on Globalfoundries' 14nm node rather than the TSMC nodes they've used on the two previous models of the Xbox One, then I have a feeling it could actually end up putting so much pressure on Globalfoundries' 14nm node that with Ryzen/Epyc/Threadripper and Polaris production in full swing they simply don't have the spare capacity for volume production of Vega. Even if the APU in the new Xbox is again made using a TSMC node it could be that they simply don't have the capacity due to all the CPUs and older generation GPUs they're cranking out.

GF switched 14nm nodes from LPE to LPP for both CPU/GPU and presumably APU with HBM2 SoC. TSMC and GF are the exclusive partners for AMD. Samsung isn't currently in the mix beyond HBM2/SK Hynix production of HBM2. Samsung is in the middle of heavy production across several fabs for much larger contracts, including their own for the mobile space. Those get first priority.

This isn't rocket science. Vegas FE will be a very profitable release and one that stays in Q2 thus bumping up AMD's books and keeping Wall Street happy. Vega Consumer will get a full quarter run along with FE and will continue the graphics growth. The CPU growth is very substantial and with Threadripper and Naples [Epyc] you have the enterprise chomping at the bit to get their hands on this stuff.

In three months people will wonder what the fuss was all about.