Allen
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Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 8,839
Ohio USA
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The reason why AMD's Vega power was high
Power optimization engineers went to EPYC
It is no big secret that Vega 64 and 56 had quite high thermals and didn’t actually meet some of its performance targets. Some key power optimization engineers were pulled from the Vega team to the more important goal. The Naples server chip had a higher priority.
The server, chip now known as EPYC had more priority for long-term performance and the survival of AMD and we definitely agree with this assessment. But since AMD doesn’t have a lot of talented engineers sitting around, moving some people from one group to another could affect the end result.
Taking key talents from GPU and moving them to the server business meant that EPYC has some impressive power to performance ratios but at the same time Vega didn’t.
At least now it makes a bit more sense.
This article has the same theme as a previous post n the thread. AMD put the effort where the money was to be made. And succeeded in catching up to Intel CPUs -- at the cost of allowing Nvidia GPUs to be uncontested at the very highest end.