The King..? Nvidia...
Mere process shrink of their current stuff?
what about compute?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10304/nvidia-announces-the-geforce-gtx-1080-1070
Will we we see this in a Mac?
will AmD prevail?
Lemon Bon Bon.
what about compute?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10304/nvidia-announces-the-geforce-gtx-1080-1070
Will we we see this in a Mac?
will AmD prevail?
Lemon Bon Bon.
Comments
I doubt we’d even see the 1070M in an iMac.
https://www.twitch.tv/nvidia/v/64989878
It looks like the 1080 will be about 70% faster than a 980 or 50% faster than a 980ti. There was a rumor saying Apple would be sticking with AMD, they'll get better prices from them and they are using 14nm vs 16nm for NVidia. NVidia's prices have dropped a lot though, just $599 for the 1080. They'd be able to offer it as an option.
AMD will have the 8GB R9 490 and 490X. They also have a 350W dual-GPU Radeon Pro Duo for $1500 that is 16TFLOPs. The Mac Pro uses up to 2x3.5 TFLOP GPUs so the next one should be around double at 6-8 TFLOPs per GPU. The Radeon Pro Duo uses two older generation GPUs for some reason.
Whichever Apple uses, each individual GPU would be faster than 980 SLI so the top Mac Pro will be like having quad 980 SLI. This will suit 4K video workflows:
The iMac will have some R9 M490x or something like that, which should exceed a single 980:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R9-M490.164289.0.html
NVidia showed off single-pass multi-projection rendering. This reduces some of the requirements for VR because it doesn't need to do each viewport separately. The NVidia CEO said they get the extra viewports for free so I expect the overhead to be just for the pixels not seen in each viewport. It also means no stretching in side displays for things like flight sims and VR. Just now they render a flat, wide viewport and stretch it round.
There was a demo at another event showing the new Doom game running on a GTX 1080 with Vulkan at 1080p:
It manages to get over 200FPS but mainly is around 120-140FPS. There should be good GPU performance improvements all round in the next Macs and even for people who don't use the GPU much, it means better battery life because it can do the same tasks with half the power consumption and less fan noise. The Macbook already got an extra hour of battery life, the MBPs could get this too or they might cut the battery down to taper them.
The Mac gaming audience has been growing, Steam surveys suggest around 4 million active out of 125 million (this would be expected relative to Apple's worldwide Mac marketshare) and mostly using Macbook Pros:
http://www.macgamerhq.com/news/steam-mac-games
Some will be using Bootcamp. If Apple invested in porting games at say $1-5m and just did 100 of the best games so invested ~$200m then if each of the 100 games sells 500,000 copies at $40 and Apple gets a 30% cut, they make $600m back. Worst case they should be able to break even on it and it adds value to the platform.
Thanks for the interesting and thorough reply, Marvin.
50% faster than a 980ti.
Guessing that Apple are staying with AMD... (Weren't Nvidia suing Apple? Is that why we don't have Nv cards in the Mac now? Or is it just down to 'compute?') I'm hoping that the next high end 'iMac' GPU with Polaris inside can match or beat a 980Ti.
I think the benchmarks will be intriguing given the process shrink has been on the 'cards' (heh) for a while now. GPU performance having pretty much stagnated over the last 5 years. I want competition back in the GPU market.
Your idea to give a few million to each game developer to make Mac gaming a real force is intriguing. Why not use some of the 'iOS' gravy money to do so to give the Mac even more momentum.
Apple may claim they don't have to as iOS is the platform of the future and game developers are queueing up to make games for it. I still like your idea, though. They'd make their money back at the Mac app store which could do with an injection of excitement. Steam survey is interesting as Mac gaming gets momentum. It had to, though? As they sheer weight of Mac sales now, 4-5 million a quarter (for some time, now!) are pulling the game market along on the Mac by brute force of unit numbers. Mac is good to game on! I WoW on it. I used to CoH on it!"The iMac will have some R9 M490x or something like that, which should exceed a single 980"
Yeah. That's the least I'm expecting. Sounds like a decent card. But considering Ti cards will probably drop like a stone in price and Apple will ream us on GPU upSell, I'm expecting 980Ti and above performance from a massive die shrink. I want 4-5k performance on 3D at 60FPS. If I don't get it...then I'll postpone an iMac purchase from this year until next until I get it. I'm fed up of giving money for sideways or nominal performance. I want a big shift after all this time. We hear a lot of noise about 4/5k. I want a system, a GPU, memory, SSD, CPU (6-8 cores, not just four) that can through 4k performance around a bit.
But I'll be looking at the benches of this year's Nv vs AMD battle with great interest.
Lemon Bon Bon.
PS. "AMD will have the 8GB R9 490 and 490X. They also have a 350W dual-GPU Radeon Pro Duo for $1500 that is 16TFLOPs. The Mac Pro uses up to 2x3.5 TFLOP GPUs so the next one should be around double at 6-8 TFLOPs per GPU. The Radeon Pro Duo uses two older generation GPUs for some reason.
Whichever Apple uses, each individual GPU would be faster than 980 SLI so the top Mac Pro will be like having quad 980 SLI. This will suit 4K video workflows"
Well. My next rig's primary use will be creative mandate. I want lots of VRAM. 4k power! Super fast SSDs...etc...
I remember when you DID have an option of either an AMD or Nvidia card as a BTO option for a Mac Tower... Now we are 'single vendor' 'choice' only.
Not that I mind AMD's GPUs... The Polaris GPUs should be competitive.
Lemon Bon Bon.
I think it might be to do with AMD's financial state. They are right on the edge of going bankrupt. Their shareholders currently have $0.5b in debt. If the debt keeps growing, I don't know how much longer they will maintain it until they look for a sale. I think Polaris is AMD's last chance and if it doesn't turn things around for them, which is probably likely considering the declining PC industry, they will be out or scaled down within the next year. This will cause a bit of a headache for console manufacturers.
AMD is winning contracts but it's because they are undercutting NVidia, Apple will be getting cheap prices. Getting the sales is good but selling cheap doesn't help turn their finances around. It could also mean they aren't delivering the best quality chips, TSMC has been giving priority to NVidia.
Their Radeon Pro Duo might have been an attempt to improve high-end compute sales but it's $1500 using older GPUs and it turns out the 1080 at $600 is almost as fast. In compute terms, the Radeon is better at 16TFLOPs but the 1080 does 9TFLOPs and can be overclocked. Buying 2x 1080s is still cheaper. The Radeon Pro Duo seems a bit pointless.
Yeah they'd be better with universal titles and they can even restrict the titles to the more recent mobile hardware to help improve hardware sales.I think the Mac Pro will manage that but not the iMac, nor even next year's iMac, although it depends on the game. An overclocked 1080 is only just holding 60FPS at 4K:
http://www.mobipicker.com/nvidia-gtx-1080-4k-benchmarks-leaked/
There's a video showing mobile graphics doing raytracing over 5x faster than a 980ti. That's really the kind of thing that's needed to take gaming to the next level. Just have an inexpensive low-power chip doing all the lighting calculations in fixed function hardware and have the GPU do the geometry, textures and shaders.
The iMac should be able to handle VR at a decent quality and it will manage less demanding games at 4K 60FPS.
The iMac should be able to handle VR at a decent quality and it will manage less demanding games at 4K 60FPS."
Mobile graphics x5 than Raytracing? (I didn't see the link for that...I looked...) Like you say. That's the kind of advance we need in 3D. A separate chip 'just for that' would be cool. For content creation and games. Why doesn't Apple throw a few billion that way(!) and make their Macs and iPads advantaged in 'that way?' With 250 million in the bank...it's almost like Apple, at times, lets the Mac 'coast.' *looks at Pro, iMac, Laptops. I haven't seen anything compelling in a while. And still with the premium prices.
Sure we can look to Intel and 'blame' them. But ram, gpu, SSD boots are within Apple's power. A dip of 20%+ in unit share (was it?) is a warning not to take consumers for granted...
As for an iMac. 4K at 60FPS. I'm sure it will be dependent on the game. I'll be watching Polaris very closely for this. Will we even need the 'mobile' version of the chip if the reports about its power saving are so true?
I'm a little underwhelmed at the 1080 getting 'just' 60FPS. I was expecting just a little bit more, I guess. I hope this doesn't mean I'll be disappointed with Polaris. Your comments are noted though so I'll keep my expectations in check until I see actual benchmarks which should be imminent over the next month?
"I suspect the problem with NVidia in the new Mac Pro is that they didn't want to play ball with Apple attempts to innovate in the workstation market. AMD one the other hand is getting good traction with its custom operations. Now the chips might not be as custom as AMDs gaming solutions but the boards certainly are. Plus AMD is on the ball with high speed memory solutions so I suspect it is easy for Apple to ignore NVidia and the questionable value in their hardware."
An incisive comment. I watched a youtube channel on NV vs AMD in this regard which alluded to the fact that AMD changed their strategy a while back to low power and to playing the 'custom card' and the 'long game.'
They're in all the console hardware. Probably in the imminent and next gen consoles. Probably have design wins for the Polaris in Apple laptops and desktops. Sure, Apple will squeeze them for margins but AMD are used to that in CPUs. It's still good money in millions upon millions of products. Who serves more volume in that regard? AMD ro NV?
NV are very much the hard core gaming PC crowed. But that's a very small part of the PC market.
Add Zen to the party. If the IPC is 40%, at least as higher, and with extra cores...eg 6 or 8 at a cheaper price than Intel... I wonder if Apple will go there?
With a former A chip engineer on Zen I wonder if Apple and AMD could have done a secret project on future x86 hardware? It would mean Apple could reduce prices, maintain margins maybe without getting reamed on Intel prices?
Hmm. An x86 emulator on chip on a 'Mac' A series chip? Given Intel CiSc'd on a Risc and the overhead became 'nothing' after a while... I wonder if such an idea is outlandish?
Lemon Bon Bon.
The iMac should be able to handle VR at a decent quality and it will manage less demanding games at 4K 60FPS."
Mobile graphics x5 than Raytracing? (I didn't see the link for that...I looked...)
As for a mobile version don't expect the power savings to exist in high end cards. By this I mean they will likely try to hit the same power points as existing cards to drive much better performance. It is in the lower end chips that we might start to see far better thermals as the GPU manufactures can offer a slightly better performance at far cooler levels of operation which will appeal to many. Probably! You see from my perspective AMD is a much better choice than NVidia. The willingness to do custom work is a big part of that. Imagine a ZEN APU with Apple specific IP in it. Further the Mac Pro wouldn't even exist in its current form without the team work that came from AMD.
The graphics, memory, SSD etc matter more to top-end buyers. Apple sells about 20 million Macs per year vs the PC industry with around 300 million. Out of that 20 million, the vast majority will be buying at the entry level, mostly Macbook, Macbook Air and 13" Pro with integrated graphics. Intel has something like 70% of the graphics market overall.
There's lots of PC marketshare to gain but it's gained by dropping prices rather than increasing spec. If Apple ever made a $500 laptop, their marketshare would explode but they'd have to use very low-end components and cut margins.
The Mac updates for the most part still seem to be on roughly a yearly update cycle but they feel like are getting further apart, probably due to the updates not delivering much improvement. Intel isn't delivering CPU improvements any more. Skylake quad-i7s won't even double the quad-i7s from 5 years ago. The 5 years prior to that, they went up 4x.
Apple buys SSDs from Samsung, Toshiba etc so the suppliers set some of the price for storage but Apple should be able to cut prices there a lot. Apple doesn't deduct the entry 256GB for the upgrade pricing. They charge $300 for 256GB upgrade to 512GB total, which is $122 retail, they charge $800 for 768GB, which is $329 retail. They could easily do $200 for the 256GB upgrade and $500 for the 768GB. It would be good if they sold external TB3 drives too in the blade form factor at those prices.
Some NVidia results and Polaris specs are here:
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080-3dmark-firestrike-benchmarks/
http://wccftech.com/amd-r9-480x-470x-specs-allegedly-revealed/
Some AMD GPUs are rebrands of old GPUs. The desktop R9 480X might go in the iMac but I still think they'll use the mobile version M480X. It says the desktop GPU has 5.5TFLOPs, which is just below a 980ti. The 980 manages some games at 4k 60FPS, lowering quality settings while maintaining resolution would help out:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-980-Desktop.128942.0.html
The mobile GPU possibly suitable for the MBP is 2.5TFLOPs so that's around a 970M, which is more than double the current MBP AMD GPU:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-970M.126694.0.html
They might not use the highest model though. Usually the upgrades are no more than 50% over the year before.
http://wccftech.com/gpu-market-share-q3-2015-amd-nvidia/
Even with cutting GPU prices, AMD is almost at half the revenue they had 5 years ago and made over $2 billion in losses over the period since. I think NVidia has done a better marketing job in recent years and they are getting games developers involved more with their SDKs.
The market for both AMD/NVidia is continually shrinking but AMD will be out first and then NVidia will gain from that and be able to continue as the only high-end GPU manufacturer for a few years.
If so...when will their 'Vega' (Is it?) high end card appear? 2017?
So you'll have Polaris 11 'low end' going into laptops.
Polaris 10 'Mid Range' going into iMacs.
Presumably the 'low end' will out form previous laptop chips...and the '10' will out perform the previous 'high end' (with higher clocks on the desktop version?)
But what about the high end? What's the equivalent of the 1080 Nv card? Is the AMD high part 'late?'
Lemon Bon Bon.
Vega will be 2017. I assumed Polaris 10 would be desktop and 11 notebook but I guess 10 covers higher power mobility models.
AMD will launch the GPUs at Computex so I reckon Apple will announce new Macs at WWDC in 4 weeks. Redesigned MBPs, updated Mac Pro 18-core/32-thread (50% faster) with GPUs faster than dual 980ti (they can say this is 3-4x faster than the last model), iMac would be a smaller spec bump, maybe they'll finally have an external 5K display.
Imminent.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Lemon Bon Bon.
http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/notebook/r9-m200
Apple could have switched to notebook NVidia 980/1080 in 2016. Vega is apparently going to be in limited supply due to HBM but this should only affect desktop GPUs:
http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-rx-vega-limited-quantities-launch/
Not only that, some early tests show it being slower than a 1080 and there's a 1080ti above that:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/amd-vega-gpu-specifications
So a year later than NVidia's 1080 and potentially slower. This is the kind of thing that happened with IBM/Motorola and the PPC. They held back Apple for years because they couldn't deliver and they dragged it on until Apple had no choice but to switch to Intel but there was years of suffering for customers in the mean-time. Apple users have missed out on doubling iMac GPU performance for a year because they won't switch to NVidia. The NVidia 1050 notebook is faster than the AMD 460 in the MBP too:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-Pro-460.181783.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1050-Notebook.178614.0.html
AMD needs financial support from their partners but Apple can't save them when their business model isn't working, they can just delay their losses and annoy Apple customers in the process by delaying all the Mac updates. They have ruined an entire product line in the Mac Pro because they can't supply GPUs for it. It's not entirely AMD's fault, nobody is buying at those price points any more so Apple can't guarantee the orders to justify AMD giving them low prices on the components but they tied the design of the machine to AMD. NVidia isn't going to offer custom GPUs for a low price just like they didn't for the games consoles.
iMac updates won't be out until mobile Vega. They are noted as being a mix of Polaris and Vega chips, so some will be rebrands:
http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-rx-500-rx-560m-notebook-gpu/
Look at the 580 vs 480, just slightly above an NVidia 1060:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/amd-rx-500-series-release-date
The i7-7700k is out already but Apple was hinting that an iMac update would be later in the year. Skylake and Kaby Lake X could be used for an iMac Pro:
http://wccftech.com/intel-x299-hedt-skylake-x-kaby-lake-x-launch-26-june-nda/
They might be able to manage a 10/12-core 27" iMac for $3500. If Vega mobile manages 7TFLOPs (which it should as the NVidia 1080 mobile manages 8TFLOPs) that's a direct switchover for the Mac Pro at a lower price.