Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus Donette and i'm here at the graphics technology conference 2016 gtc 2016 i was put on by nvidia but i'm here to talk about nvidia and AMD collectively right now because there's some interesting stuff that we've sort of thought through while here and just before diving into that let me point out this awesome dude on the wall behind me where obviously i'm in a hotel room not the normal set and that i guess is the indication of luxury that we live in while traveling for conventions but here's the thing so this is the cool stuff Pascal was showing off in a big way today at the keynote you can see that in our previous content on the website and the channel and the main item was the tesla p100 GPU so p100 is the first major pascal GPU that was really talked about in a critical way by nvidia in any way sort of beyond top level and tesla is the p100 tesla is not meant for consumers not geforce product it will never be a Jeep forest product but these super computing devices are on architectures that predicate sort of the eventual arrival of geforce and consumer cards so it is an important product to at least look at or understand a top-level tesla p100 is shipping for a quarter won 20-17 the announcement is expected for quarter 4 2016 through the OEM so MSB Dell HP IBM and cray those are the ones who will be shipping it immediately with their sort of high end devices so that's the timeline for high-end Pascal that does not mean that there won't be a consumer level release of Pascal before then and there probably will be just based on speculation and what we're used to with the industry here's what's interesting AMD has a large window right now to start making a pretty serious come back in terms of market share whatever you think of their numbers in terms of FPS that's all obviously objective and you look it up we've done the testing ourselves but whatever you think of a number is whether you are in one camp or the other the one thing that really can't be overlooked right now is that AMD is a sort of rising in API performance with the new API is so Direct X 12 Vulcan they're doing pretty well there right now and a lot of that is thanks to the asynchronous compute architecture that they have that does not mean that Nvidia can't that perform them I'm really not speaking to that right now but what it does mean is that in the very least they're starting to look good and if you like them or not AMD has a very small percentage of the global market share right now for gaming so they're in a bad spot in terms of just sort of global dominance of the the market and video last I checked was more than 65 for something maybe as high as seventy percent now of the market for geforce cards so that's it's it's important for AMD to start making moves if they really want to stay in this market and obviously we would all love them to stay in the market because competition is the only reason and if it improves the only reason prices are reasonable and both these companies AMD and NVIDIA and if you look outside of them intel included and even armed an arm doesn't even really compete in desktop they don't compete in x86 all these semiconductor and silicon companies they drive gaming innovation they work with the engine developers arm has worked with epic again not even really x86 but they do it and that drives graphics technology it improves the engine tech at a lower level so even if you don't care about this super best realistic graphics it does still improve performance on low-end devices and make things more accessible so it's very important that AMD stays in the game and they do make some good GPU products right now and because of this Pascal sort of I don't know if it's a delay or just a really long time line of development but because Pascal is taking so long to get out to consumers and it has a really good opportunity to start making moves with Polaris and with na'vi so here's a quick thing about polaris i think a lot of people don't understand polaris is more of a stepping stone to na'vi which is the one that people really should care a lot about not the say polaris isn't worth caring about but polaris is making big moves to 14 nanometer FinFETs i believe they're so nvidia and AMD are both moving down to 14 and the 16 nanometer FinFET transistors process node and this is a move from 28 nanometers that's a massive reduction and what that means if you don't know is an increase in performance per watt so the wat draw will if it remains the same the performance will be much higher or if performance may be marginally improves then in the very least we get a wattage reduction that is somewhat significant and obviously good for everyone so and also good for heat by the way that lowers the the thermals so with that said the FinFET transistors the reason they're called thin fat the fin fi n it sort of literally means it's shaped like a fin like a shark fin so the transistors got this it's almost like a bucket or it's like that and it helps prevent things like the power leakage and that's what improves a lot of the the performance per watt that said the the move to the smaller architecture the processing node is critical and the gains will certainly be unless something else goes terribly wrong the gains will be pretty substantial and at least the power department and with nav e and E is going to be running hbm to with Polaris it's not hbm to but I can tell you it's probably hbm one or gddr5 or gddr5 X I know that only rules out one thing so Polaris probably gddr5 or 5x maybe the high end is hpm I don't know I'm not clear on that but Pascal will be hbm to and hbm to is a one terabyte per second bandwidth theoretical maximum throughput memory architecture and that is 4096 bits wide that is a massive bus with HB m1 is I believe 512 gigabytes per second dish on the fury X it's it's 128 gigabytes per second per stack so it depends on how many stacks they have but that's what hbm one is so even moving from that this is going to be a pretty big deal Pascal or Polaris excuse me Polaris is due sometime soon i don't have a timeline on that is anything more than what you guys know but polaris is looking like somewhere in the next few months if we're lucky before august if am d can start shipping before nvidia it's it's going to be really good for them because md right now they are looking pretty good in asynchronous compute benchmarks Pascal will definitely improve and videos performance in Direct X 12 in Vulcan and that's going to start threatening AMD's potential I don't know if it's really a lead but it'll it'll threaten am these minimally market perception in the immediate future when Pascal comes out that's that's sort of the threat to Andy is a the very least their market perception with the DX 12 and Vulcan new API performance so if Andy can push this newer architecture which will definitely further asynchronous processing capabilities it'll have better performance per watt which is where they've really struggled in the fury x did improve that a lot but it still was behind and videos equivalent devices they've got a good window they can really make things happen and we've been very critical of AMD the last few years for their GPUs CPUs different stories some of the CPUs are pretty damn good the ATK for example pretty good cpu less than 100 bucks but we're not talking about that today their drivers were pretty bad not a full generation ago but the 300 series I was very critical of it of 380 and the 390 launch those improved massively since then and we've said this several times where and these drivers have actually gotten pretty good now and their software has improved with radeon settings they're on a pretty big upswing and Sam son in some ways has bailed out AMD to help create this upswing or at least perpetuated and that is because Sam son is helping with fabricating some of the new products so that's that's a big deal Sam son is a big vendor if they have an interest in AMD that's good for AMD they certainly need alliances because GlobalFoundries has been there fab and if Samsung can fabricate things too then they're in good shape just sort of quick recap here and these a fabless processor manufacturers so so I'm like Intel were they on their own fabrication plants and the got rid of there's a long time ago they use GlobalFoundries now they're using samsung in addition to that so that's a big deal so I just wanted to bring up that discussion point where AM DS in a good position right now and a lot of that is to do with the architecture the reduction in fab process the process node where Nvidia and AMD are both moving to smaller sizes from 28 animators to 14 and 16 whoever gets there first will have pretty big gains and that's important for mark your presence and market perception and then the other thing of course is the new API is where am d and NVIDIA are both definitely working to improve asynchronous computation of commands as they come down the pipe and that will correspond to work better with direct expelled and with Vulcan and things like that which are growing API is in the game and market space right now I would say definitely pay close attention to the launch schedule for polaris for na'vi and for pascal and probably for in terms of benchmarking you should be looking at a lot of new API benchmarks for these cards not just traditional dx11 benchmarks and we'll be running both of those api's and the x11 s will be running all three and obviously that's sometime in the future but check back the channel for that as things roll out so let me know what you think post a comment below what your thoughts are for am these current window of opportunity i suppose what you think about the pascal architecture versus the new polaris or na'vi architectures interested to read what you think and maybe we'll talk about it next ask GN episode but as always if you like this content hit the patreon link the postural video to help us out directly post comment below and I'll see you all next time