I was thinking today, about my yesterdays conversation with one game developer who had already got his hands on complete GPU from Vega architecture, however, do not get excited. He didn't said anything about the performance of the GPU, nor how it behaved, I could not pull from him absolutely anything meaningful in the context of performance compared with other GPUs. However he have said more technical stuff in both specific and general terms, of the hardware.
And would you have thought, about the synchronicity...
http://lpgpu.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/lpgpu_scalarization_169_Jan_Lucas.pdf
This has appeared in Beyond3D Forum in the thread about Vega GPUs and in the context of Scalarization of the GPU. It is directly related to the patent that has appeared in the internet many many months ago.
What he have said is that Vega will be Scalar architecture and it is pretty much reset of GCN and Radeon as a brand. Both(!) engineering teams were working on Vega architecture for past 2.5 years, to this point, because it had to be synced with Zen release, because the GPUs will be used in Zen APUs. He did not wanted to say how big difference the scalarization of the GPU might have make, because that way he could tell too much specifics. He also said that he knows how Zen will behave and perform, but it is the same story as with Vega - nothing specific I could take out from him. It was great conversation about the gaming industry, technology, poltics in the gaming industry(well, who would have thought...). He also have said that Polaris was mostly made for Apple, Sony, and GloFo request(WSA required buying wafers, what would be better way to do this?).
So in the end,
how big difference in terms of performance we could get with Scalar GPU architecture? I see that from theoretical models the improvement is around 30% Register File space saved by this, and around the same amount of power efficiency. But this is theoretical model, based on very old architecture.
