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Intel's attempt at countering Navi
https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/turing-gpu-16gbps-gddr6
I don't see how a bit faster memory will help them. Nvidia's problem is overpriced cards and that is where I think Navi will have the upper hand. The ray tracing debacle is not going to help them either. I certainly won't buy Nvidia if AMD has anything close to their performance at a reasonable price and I think the majority of consumers will look at price first.
I don't see how a bit faster memory will help them. Nvidia's problem is overpriced cards and that is where I think Navi will have the upper hand. The ray tracing debacle is not going to help them either. I certainly won't buy Nvidia if AMD has anything close to their performance at a reasonable price and I think the majority of consumers will look at price first.
Comments
I think you answer your own question: if this improves performance then it goes into the comparisons we all make. And remember its easy for NVidia to lower the price - whether they would make a profit is another matter.
I wonder though if this simply stems from the partnership NVidia have entered into with Samsung?
1) The GPU chips have supported higher memory clock speeds all along. The only reason that those higher clock speeds weren't used in the cards already sold is that they couldn't get the memory chips at acceptable quantities and prices from Micron, Samsung, or Hynix. Now they can, so they'll do so.
2) Before they made the first big production order, there were some things done wrong with the chip that would allow them to increase performance significantly as the expense of having to do another respin. They decided to launch the cards as is and do the respin later. Now that the respin is done, they can produce slightly higher performance GPUs for exactly the same cost as before, so they might as well.
Based on the amount of time that has passed since the cards launched, I'd think that (1) is more likely than (2). But it's also possible that their initial run took a lot longer to sell out than they expected, so the explanation is (2), and they didn't want to start selling the respin until the original production run had sold out.
Regardless, it's not really an attempt at specifically countering Navi. They offer parts with a little better performance because they can and it doesn't cost them much to do so.
They'll probably have better 32-core CPUs later this year when the next generation Threadripper launches. Hopefully that won't have the weird memory configuration, either, if it's derivative of what they've said for Epyc Rome.
Really, though, PCI Express is an industry standard. There's nothing wrong with pairing an Intel CPU with an AMD GPU or an AMD CPU with an Nvidia GPU. Going all-AMD (or all-Intel) is really only forced on you if you want to use an integrated GPU.