Reader Mail for March Loose Ends
Added 2023-04-10 07:40:10 +0000 UTCAlright, Tom should be doing a Livestream on the evening of April 10th, and this time we're hoping to give you all a decent amount of time to submit questions. The past 5 weeks have seen many developments worth discussing:
- Phoenix iGPU Performance Leaks
- RTX 4070 Pricing, Performance, and Specs Leaks
- Raptor Lake Refresh Leaks
- Continued Intel ARC Drama
- Zen 5 Leaks
- The Release of the R7 7800X3D
- New insights into RADEON & GeForce by MLID
- Continued Price drops on most Products
So let's GO! Write in below with your thoughts and questions regarding the subjects listed above...or of course don't be afraid to ask anything else regarding recent news or future product releases.
You have ~12 hours (Till Monday Afternoon US Central Time) to submit below!
Comments
I expect that eventually all CPUs will have v-cache because cache just doesn't scale with shrinking nodes as logic does, so in my opinion, we can write off that argument.
Athena Azuraea
2023-04-11 09:28:52 +0000 UTCGood evening Tom your hard work is showing in a growing channel. I recently talked to an Nvidia insider and he said that Jensen's vision is not being a GPU company but a AI company. They are building a virtual version of earth itself, seriously thats his vision for the future.
Dr Forbin
2023-04-11 00:05:44 +0000 UTCDo you think part of the reason AMD refuses to release something that beats Nvidia's halo product is that they don't think enough people will actually change their decision and buy Radeon? You know how car enthusiasts beg car manufacturers to release sports cars with manual transmissions but only a few actually buy them, or they just wait until they depreciate enough to buy used, thus not giving the manufacturer a sale. I wonder if AMD thinks this way too.
UFUFUFU
2023-04-10 23:11:08 +0000 UTCTo phrase it another way, I expect the gap between the 7700X and the 7800X3D to become larger with time as games become more complex. The more complex they become the larger their data structures will become and the worse cache hit rates become... and the larger the benefit of V-cache will become. It's not that games on the 7700X would suddenly become entirely unplayable but you might find the highest settings unplayable.
Chris Rijk
2023-04-10 22:18:09 +0000 UTCHave you gotten any updates from sources on sales? The only way to get Nvidia (And AMD to some extent) to give better gen over gen performance is to reject overpriced inventory and let it pile up so retailers cancel/stop orders. Outside of the 4090, I can't think of a single product, desktop or laptop, announced in the last 6 months worth buying and I hope other customers feel the same.
B. Fish
2023-04-10 17:58:39 +0000 UTCWill a computer with a decent, contemporary-gen* CPU and GPU ever be CPU-bound in many games again, or will we continue to be always GPU bound at reasonable settings and resolutions? *(that is to say, a 7700x and rx 7900xt now, or an 8700x and rx 8900xt in a year or two, or a 10700x(?) and rx 11900xt in 5 years?)
Alexander
2023-04-10 17:45:09 +0000 UTCIs AMD unable to resolve issues with RDNA3 through driver updates? There's no sign of a 7800XT yet (or 7700XT for that matter), which would normally have been announced by now (5 months after high end). The distinguishing factor of the 7600 mobile is the reduced I/O, so this seems to be another sign that the multiple I/O dies in RDNA 3 are part of the problem.
Lo_Res_Gamer
2023-04-10 17:18:54 +0000 UTCMeteor Lake is quite a radical change to Intel’s design and manufacturing process but I see little discussion about it these days. Okay, it might not be coming out on desktop but the laptop market far larger. No matter how significant it might become for the general laptop market, would it be fair to say that it’s going to be a non-event for gaming enthusiasts? Is it literally too little too late?
Chris Rijk
2023-04-10 16:10:51 +0000 UTCIn my opinion, that 3D chips makes no sense at all unless you absolutely must max out your framerate. Today's CPUs are stronger than the consoles, so I don't really see games struggling to run on a 7800X today for a good number of years. In a couple of years, hopefully before the end of AM5 platform, we'll see CPUs that couple be around 70% faster than today's CPUs too (20% year over year improvement). Wouldn't then make more sense to save $100 today by not spending it on something you don't need and investing it towards a new CPU in 3-4 years instead? Not only will games be faster, but everything else too.
Athena Azuraea
2023-04-10 16:07:42 +0000 UTCAre AMD’s CPU design teams more flexible than Intel’s? Your recent Zen 5 leak suggests to me that they can keep their options open until fairly late in the design process and can make non-trivial last minute changes if they have to. Have you ever gotten similar impressions from Intel’s design teams? (and I don’t mean simply axing individual products) In addition, it seems like Turin taped out after Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest but will hit the market much sooner. That’s not good for Intel’s competitiveness either.
Chris Rijk
2023-04-10 15:53:42 +0000 UTCIs buying a 7800X3D today similar to stretching to get a 12 or 16GB graphics card in 2020? If you want your CPU to last 3-5 years of gaming, it’s probably your best option. If you’re happy to upgrade every 1-2 years it’s probably overkill in most cases. Sure, something like an 8-core Zen 5 will likely be a bit faster at gaming on average and productivity tasks in particular but I wouldn’t expect it to be much cheaper on release. The 7800X3D is also low maintenance in the sense that it works fine on cheap motherboards, cheap memory and cheap coolers.
Chris Rijk
2023-04-10 15:33:11 +0000 UTCDo you think it's time for a paradigm shift. It feels like pc gaming has long gotten too bloated with skus and how powerful the components are getting but they are too disconnected to get more beneficial effects. the ps5 finally being taken advantage of is showing the cracks.
Swiggles
2023-04-10 15:08:38 +0000 UTCIs the high price of Lovelace Nvidia slowly warming us up for what’s to come with Blackwell on 3nm?
XTX 999
2023-04-10 14:42:41 +0000 UTCHello Tom, earlier in the year on multiple occasions you said to wait a few months to see change on Nvidia GPU prices, it’s been a few months and only the 7900xt has dropped in price from what I see. Are these prices here to stay, or should we be patient a little longer?
XTX 999
2023-04-10 14:30:05 +0000 UTCGet out your crystal ball. What will future GPU performance enable in the next couple generations? What upgrade cycles will it drive? Seeing the promise of the ASUS ROG Ally and reality of the Steam Deck make me think iGPU and power efficiency will open a whole new world of game decks running Windows that double as portable computers with external peripherals. On Desktop, I see immersion being the next frontier. Massive curved wide-screen monitors with 8K/2k+ resolution. Wireless VR/AR. Games you can barely distinguish from reality. Thoughts?
Frobozz
2023-04-10 12:59:46 +0000 UTCHey Tom, Gamers Nexus recently covered the 3DFX Voodoo5 6000 and the history of how 3DFX screwed over its AIB partners by building cards themselves. Given Nvidia's recent burning of its own AIB partners, how many more generations of cards do we have before Nvidia's AIBs either jump ship to AMD/maybe Intel, or just get out of the GPU business? With how Nvidia GPUs dominate professional and AI tasks, I don't see them going out of business, but a decent chunk of Nvidia's AIBs are just focused on making GPUs for consumers.
Cleansweep
2023-04-10 12:24:06 +0000 UTCThis is clearly not for someone that is just game by for the Jack of all trades that don't need to jump fully to a workstation CPU. The bridge zone to thread ripper that AMD has never SKU d.
BaconHouse Collective
2023-04-10 11:23:54 +0000 UTCHey Tom. This may be a better question to hold for an broken silicon with an engineer guest which is fine. With the 7950 X3D issues with CCDs on different clock speeds and latency penalty, is a 4 CCD mini "thread ripper" like CPU the future answer for the enthusiast tier of consumer CPUs. In this design philosophy there will be a primary high-clocked 8-core CCD and a primary 8 core clock down V cache CCD. Then a secondary of each. Then tasks schedule to the appropriate primary and secondary for their needs. If it's isn't going to use V cache it's will use the two high clocked CCDs. Gaming using both V cache CCDs. And for core driven tasks their is also a all 32 core mode as the Vcache CCD speed. Or if a game needed more cores in the future the non Vcache CCD can take some overhead from the two v cache cores at their speed. Latency and less than potential boost clocks would still be an issue. And this would also likely be a bigger die on a new larger threadripperesque socket. But would also extend the PCIE lanes and have good thermals with the larger IHS and half the cores dormant for most tasks that don't need them. Thoughts?
BaconHouse Collective
2023-04-10 11:21:46 +0000 UTCHi, Tom. You mentioned that two more of Nvidia's partners are considering pulling out, but it's not concrete yet. I think that if it's just two partners lost for the next generation, they can still manufacture enough cards to saturate the market, as they ramp-up production of founders cards. It seems like Nvidia's abusive behavior is calculated so that they can always replace the lost partner capacity by upping their internal production. Do you think that by the 60 series they can afford to drop their AIB partners entirely or is that the plan for the 70 series?
coladict
2023-04-10 10:58:06 +0000 UTCHi Tom, Your 10 P core conversation was interesting. It would've been hard for intel to predict that 8c/16 would be heralded as the optimal gaming cpu config. But, in hindsight they could have created an 8 P core cpu with the same die size as the i5 (8e=2p) and undercut the 7700x. Intel's large L2 cache and improved L3 helps 13th gen compete with zen4 when referencing the i7. Unfortunately, although e-cores are benchmarking beasts, they may only offer practical use cases for gamers running discord or streaming software in the background. What product market fit were intel hoping to create with the i5 when most content creators that need high multi threading would opt for an i7 or higher. Shouldn't the i5 have been designed to be the default choice for gamers.
tasty bounlaki
2023-04-10 10:42:51 +0000 UTCWhy are salespeople at stores failing to explain to people why they need to see RTX only on the 40-series?
Jen-Hsun Huang
2023-04-10 10:35:20 +0000 UTCAMD's GPU prices keep dropping, both for the 6000s and 7000s. It's gotten so ridiculous that recently Daniel Owen compared a 3070 Ti with a 6950xt with equal price. Is AMD pressured by the supply/lack of sales, or are they trying to be more price competitive? And how much longer until Nvidia has to crack? Even if they sell off to the pro market, nobody's going to buy fleets of 3070s.
KingHarkinian
2023-04-10 10:31:11 +0000 UTCWith the rumoured price of the 4070 at $600, will this trigger a price reduction for the higher end models?
Steven Dick
2023-04-10 09:59:16 +0000 UTCI personally don't see why Intel should do that. Consider what each core is good at: Big cores at good at single-threaded tasks and big, complicated tasks. How many single-threaded tasks are you going to run simultaneously? Small cores are great at multi-threading. This is not just an Intel vs AMD thing. This is rooted in physics. The higher the frequency the goes, the higher the power goes. In fact, power is roughly equal to frequency cubed. Therefore, to increase multi-threading, it makes much more sense to increase the number of small cores. The reason AMD doesn't do this yet (I believe), is due to the complexity. Keeping everything the same sure simplifies things. But make no mistake - I strongly believe that we're going big.LITTLE approach for all CPU designs in the future and I do believe more focus will be put on putting in smaller cores because that's where we'll see the real performance increases. But maybe Tom could put his own perspective on the topic.
Athena Azuraea
2023-04-10 08:36:11 +0000 UTCHey Tom, I'd be interested to hear about your opinion on mobile GPU pricing. For example: here in Europe a 4090 mobile costs around the same as the desktop 4090 (source: XMG pricing upgrade from a 4060 to a 4090 which is almost 1700€). And that is kinda BS, isn't it? A 4080 chip that doesn't even has to clock as high as the 4080 itself. Where do you think pricing will go in the mid- to long-term future considering mobile GPU variants?
Dave Scholze
2023-04-10 08:25:40 +0000 UTCHey Tom, in the last die stink you and Dan talked about how the 13900k should have been a 10 + 8 instead of a 8+16. And it got me thinking, I remember you saying Arrow Lake was supposed to be 8+32 but was scraped for 8+16 to use less energy and come out quicker do you think for Intel to stay competitive with AMD do you think Intel should increase their Big core count across the board where the i9 is a 12+16, i7 10+12 and the i5 8+8. By now (hopefully) Intel has mastered their big core architecture and found ways to keep IPC and high clock speeds without turning the cpu into a furnace. With each Big core able to boost to 6+ GHz all core may give Intel time until they find an answer for Vcache in their future architectures
Kinihun25
2023-04-10 07:55:18 +0000 UTCHi Tom, Assuming Nvidia does transition to being an A.I focused company in 5 years or so, then is it reasonable to speculate that Nvidia would further shift their focus from gaming to data center? And if they do, do you think there needs to be an actual 3rd player in the space, or do you see AMD eventually make Nvidia want to innovate and go with a non-monolithic design?
alex vega
2023-04-10 07:54:16 +0000 UTC
