According to AMD in DeepBench AMD Vega GPU is 30-35% faster than GP100 chip in machine learning.
.....They also launched RX Vega Frontier Edition. 4096 GCN cores, 1.6 GHz, 16 GB HBM2, 13 TFLOPs of FP32 performance.
I watched most of the presentation. It didn't really launch. It is coming in June. They are going to talk about it until June. "Frontier" is likely just high priced, low volume, high margin. This is extremely likely to be priced far out of reach of most normal people.
AMD needs to ship before the Volta nose bleed priced product ships. Not that it will stay in the lead, but gotta get their first iteration HBMv2 out the door before competitor gets their second. ( You'd have thought AMD would have a lead given they shipped a HBMv1 product, but that really didn't transfer. )
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I guess that they're be red-faced if they compared to the Nvidia Volta chips announced a week ago.
I doubt they have a Volta ( or even most P100 customers have a Volta) card. They had a P100 card at the meeting to do the side by side demo comparison with. The explicitly mentioned main objective it just to be on the comparison charts. It is not necessarily to win. At this point they aren't even commonly charted. Have to get into the Premier league first before can talk about winning the whole thing.
They have a solid plan. It will take time and execution. The bigger gap they have is in software library coverage, not in hardware. It took several people, months to tune up their DeepBench code. They need dozens, not thousands, of folks to do that over a broader set of libraries. It isn't easy, but it is tractable.
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Right, given that GV100 absolutely destroys GP100 and the other Pascal chips in deep learning tasks, I stand by my earlier assessment. If the best they can do is 35% compared with a year-old GPU, they're in trouble at the high end IMO.
Depends upon if they can make the feature that isn't highlighted in that DeepLearning benchmark work well. Volta also has a variant with the SSD where could train over a "larger than HBMv2 is capable of" dataset. The workloads that have been tried are those that fit. There are different problem spaces that can be explored with Volta that Nvidia may not cover.
That may not be the mainstream ML market now but all AMD's is a subset where they have some leverage.
As usual this is de-evolving into some fan boy death match. It isn't only bout bragging rights on tech porn benchmarks. AMD can win without Nvidia loosing.