Hilo oficial de la guerra PC vs Consolas

Serpiente_Plyskeen · 24 Abr 2013

AMD lanza oficialmente a la Radeon HD 7990

AMD lanza oficialmente a la Radeon HD 7990
Lisandro Pardo

La historia de la Radeon HD 7990 ha sido bastante curiosa hasta este punto. AMD se tomó un buen tiempo para presentar el modelo de referencia, pero algunos OEM decidieron no esperar, y lanzaron tarjetas con dos GPU que si bien fueron autorizadas por AMD, no dejaban de estar basadas en diseños “por fuera” de Sunnyvale. Ahora, esta nueva Radeon HD 7990 es cien por ciento oficial, y además de convertirse en la tarjeta gráfica más veloz que AMD tiene para ofrecer en el mercado general, su rendimiento llega con un consumo de energía por debajo del que se puede apreciar en otros diseños.

Los canales oficiales hicieron su parte, y después de una larga espera, la tarjeta gráfica Radeon HD 7990 fue presentada en sociedad. Sin embargo, esto no quiere decir que sea la única Radeon HD 7990 en el mercado. Sólo basta con buscar la Devill3 HD7990 de PowerColor, que incluso tiene una variante con overclocking de fábrica. El anuncio de la Devill3 se realizó en agosto del año pasado, un detalle que nos ayuda a establecer el tiempo entre los diseños “cuasi-oficiales” y el nuevo modelo de referencia. Es verdad que nos hubiese gustado ver a la 7990 antes, pero AMD posee la capacidad de aplicar optimizaciones que no están disponibles en modelos previos, por lo tanto, la demora también tiene su lado positivo.

Un poco tarde, pero el nuevo tanque de AMD ya está aquí

Entre sus especificaciones, la HD 7990 posee dos GPU Tahiti derivados de la edición GHz de la Radeon HD 7970. Cada uno de estos chips tiene 2.048 procesadores Stream, y en total suman 8.620 millones de tras*istores. 6 GB de RAM GDDR5 a 6 GHz repartidos entre los dos GPU, y dos buses de 384 bits expanden la lista. El “compromiso” llega con las frecuencias, pero en realidad no es tan grande como parece: 950 MHz en núcleo, y un gigahertz en modo Boost. Si comparamos esto con los 1.000/1.050 MHz de una 7970 GE individual, la conclusión es que AMD ha hecho un buen trabajo cerrando la brecha. El beneficio más grande se puede apreciar a través del TDP. Mientras que los diseños externos pueden exceder sin dificultades los 450 vatios, el modelo de referencia de AMD está en un promedio de 375 vatios.

El objetivo principal de la Radeon HD 7990 es muy claro: Tomarse a golpes con la GeForce GTX 690, y con la nueva GTX Titan. En el caso de la Titan, la comparación es más “injusta” debido a los dos GPUs, pero hasta aquí los números indican que la HD 7990 está en un empate técnico frente a la GTX 690. Si el rendimiento y el precio (mil dólares, igual que la 690 y la Titan) son lo que se esperaba, ¿dónde está el problema? En primer lugar, AMD necesita optimizar sus controladores. El nuevo método de benchmarking conocido como FCAT tiene mucho peso en hardware con múltiples GPUs, y los números pueden terminar siendo muy diferentes para la 7990. Y en segundo lugar, Nvidia tiene una ventaja importante con el TDP de la GTX 690, ubicado en 300 vatios. Por otro lado, el rendimiento GPGPU de la HD 7990 es impresionante, y bajo ciertas condiciones de uso, esos 75 vatios extra no resultan tan serios.

A Listing of Radeon HD 7990 Manufacturers and Their Cards

Por otra parte, Ars Technica publica su segundo artículo acerca de la historia de AMD. No son nada optimistas en cuanto a su futuro (a mí me da la impresión de que pueden ser demasiado pro-Intel, pero bueno, esperemos que se equivoquen):
The rise and fall of AMD: A company on the ropes | Ars Technica

In a bad way

AMD's problems have not gone away. Despite its best efforts in engineering, its share of the PC and server markets continues to slip; despite new products intended for use in Ultrabooks and tablets, its presence in these market segments is negligible. Many computers equipped with AMD CPUs are confined to the low end of the market, where margins are low and the sales numbers are especially sensitive to the gradually slowing demand for PCs.

Former CFO Barton is not convinced that the company has much a future. “[Even without the lawsuit against Intel,] it wouldn’t have mattered,” he said. “[Sanders] took his shot, and the game’s been played.”

Ruiz also doesn't feel bullish on AMD's present chances. He argues that his strategy, while it may have had short-term downsides, would have worked out in the end. "I don't care who you are, if you're a semiconductor company you're going to compete with Intel whether you like it or not," he told Ars in a phone interview in March 2013. "Now if you ask me what is AMD all about? It's not obvious. I can't tell you. When I was there, it was obvious. We were going to compete with Intel and we were going to take market share away from them."

Ruiz's replacement lasted less than three years as CEO and was in turn replaced in late 2011 by current CEO Rory Read. Read had previously been president of Lenovo and before that had been at IBM for over 20 years. He hasn't yet been able to retool AMD; the company’s most recent 10-K SEC filing notes ominously that “approximately 85 percent of our business is focused on the legacy PC portions of the market, projected to have slowing growth over the next several years.”

On Wall Street, AMD has few friends—the stock price has fallen from around $8 at the beginning of 2012 to just above $2 a share today. “Until fairly recently, I was one of the most bullish people on [Wall Street],” said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein. The turning point for Rasgon came in late 2010, when AMD had trouble shipping its highly anticipated chip, the “Fusion” 32nm chip codenamed Llano.

“They had big problems ramping the yields,” Rasgon said. “I remember if I go back to July 2010 I was the only guy on the Street that was bullish [on AMD]. I was on the [quarterly investors’] call and they had a lot of issues. They said we fixed the problems and Llano is now going to ramp faster and the stock was up 20 percent the next day. Then they pre-announced [the company’s next earnings], saying they’re not going to make it. This was October 2010, and I downgraded the stock not because I didn’t believe the structural story anymore. They had no clue if it was a three-week or a six-month problem.”

In the end, it turned out to be closer to the latter: Llano didn’t ship until April 2011.

“[AMD is] slashing operating expenses and laying off engineers,” Rasgon added. “Last year was [cutting] fat, this year is meat and bones. Their core business is basically collapsing. The client PC [market] is down 13 percent. I was never worried about liquidity, I’m worried about them now. They are faced with a PC market that is not dead, but is not growing anymore.”

Fight for the future

AMD acknowledges its struggles. “Of course, talk is cheap—we need to deliver not just on the product front but also show progress in our financials,” said Michael Silverman, an AMD spokesperson. But the company believes it has stanched the bleeding, and AMD officials espouse full confidence a new strategy that doesn't rely on trying to "out x86" Intel—by the end of 2013, CEO Rory Read wants 20 percent of the company's revenue to come from other markets.

AMD also retains a sizable portion of both the PC and server markets, though these have been reduced since the company's heyday, and the company has rolled out relatively consistent improvements to core products like Trinity and Steamroller. The graphics division continues to put out gaming GPUs that perform competitively with those from Nvidia. Indeed, the graphics division produced one of the company's rare bits of recent good news: AMD will supply both the GPU and CPU for Sony's PlayStation 4 and is widely expected to do the same for Microsoft's next Xbox. AMD also supplies the GPU for the outgoing Wii and the struggling Wii U. Game consoles are a relative drop in the bucket compared even to the dwindling PC market (Microsoft has sold a little over 70 million Xbox 360s since 2005, and the PC market can generally meet or beat that number in a single quarter), but having its silicon in all three of the major contenders is a chunk of change and a good bit of publicity for AMD.

AMD has essentially missed the boat on tablets and smartphones, though, mostly because of its own short-sighted decisions: the company’s low-power Bobcat architecture didn’t arrive in time to take advantage of the height of the netbook craze, and AMD hasn’t been able to drum up much OEM interest in the architecture for Windows 8 tablets. In 2009, AMD sold its Imageon mobile graphics unit to Qualcomm for a mere $65 million; Qualcomm soon managed to turned this tech into the Adreno GPUs included in its immensely popular Snapdragon processors.

On the desktop side, it appears that the company is focusing on quiet but competent execution—its chips’ performance and power usage remains stuck about a year to two years behind Intel’s, but AMD has made steady and on-schedule improvements to the initially disappointing Bulldozer architecture. Still, it's now clear that this is no longer enough.

One market that AMD is really trying to corner is relatively untested today: high-density micro-servers. The company now bets that server rooms at companies like Facebook and Twitter will need to handle a huge quantity of tasks with relatively low processing requirements, and to that end AMD purchased an outfit called SeaMicro in early 2012. This purchase, at least in theory, does two things: it gives AMD an opportunity to demonstrate and sell its upcoming ARM-based Opteron chips to potential customers, and it gets AMD in the business of selling server hardware directly to Web companies rather than to hardware vendors like Dell or HP.

SeaMicro has been working on its “Freedom Fabric,” the software side of the equation, for several years now, and among the ARM licensees in the game today AMD probably has the longest history in the server market. Micro-servers could be a chance for AMD to get a toehold in a lucrative, high-margin market, something the company’s balance sheet desperately needs.

Will it work? Possibly—but AMD has to overcome deeply ingrained problems. "AMD became a large, slothy company and were careless about capital management," said Atiq Raza when asked about the company's chances. "Now, no matter what they do, they've got a great team, they've got good management, unfortunately I think it's very late."

Time may be short, but AMD is used to playing the underdog.

"This path that we’re on... we made the big bet [by purchasing graphics card maker] ATI and big engineering to optimize our engineering such that we’re cranking out all this IP on a single chip that we can mass commercially produce or in a custom configuration for someone who wants to do something unique, like Sony," John Taylor, the director of global business marketing at AMD, told Ars. "We believe it puts us in a place for the first time where we can create a place for sustained differentiation. I have a tremendous amount of faith in the new leadership team at AMD. I can’t remember one day at my time at AMD that didn’t feel urgent."

Ah, y parece que extienden el Never Settle Bundle:
UPDATE: AMD Never Settle Bundle Roadmap Leaked

Por otra parte, Nvidia no se está quieta tampoco, y anuncia las Titan LE (más barata y con dos Streaming Multiprocessors desactivados) y Titan II Ultra (que es como la Titan pero sin uno de los Streaming Multiprocessors desactivado, es decir, con todos los 2880 núcleos activos.. en una sóla GPU!):
Report: Nvidia Developing Ultra, LE Variants of GTX Titan

Report: Nvidia Developing Ultra, LE Variants of GTX Titan
By Tarun Iyer23 April 2013 18 :02 - Source: 3DCenter

Nvidia is reportedly turning the GTX Titan graphics card and GK110 silicon into its own mini-brand with the addition of the Ultra and LE variants.

According to a report from 3DCenter.org, Nvidia is currently planning to expand the GeForce GTX Titan into its own mini-family of products by releasing two new SKUs based on the GK110 silicon that will bear the LE and Ultra monikers.

Those familiar with Nvidia's naming conventions will not be surprised to find that they refer to downscaled and uprated variants of the standard GTX Titan that has different clock rates and quantity of shaders units, TMUs, and ROPs, but maintain the same base platform.

Model_______GTX Titan LE_______GTX Titan_______GTX Titan II “Ultra”
Chip Base_______Nvidia GK110_______Nvidia GK110_______Nvidia GK110
Architecture_______Kepler_______Kepler_______Kepler
Clock Rates_______837 / 876 / 3,000 MHz_______837 / 876 / 3,000 MHz_______837 / 950 / 3,400 MHz
Raster Engines_______4-5_______5_______5
Shader Units_______2496_______2688_______2880
TMUs_______208_______240_______256
ROP_______40_______48_______48
Memory_______5 GB GDDR5 320-bit_______6 GB GDDR5 384-bit_______6 GB GDDR5 384-bit
Power Consumption (Load)_______180 W – 190 W_______206 W_______220 W – 230 W
3DCenter Performance Index_______410% - 430%_______480 %_______530% - 550%

Though none of this has been officially confirmed by Nvidia, the existence of these variants has been rumored for quite some time now. Their release would certainly improve the company’s ability to compete with AMD’s upcoming Radeon HD 7990 “Malta” graphics card.

The LE and Ultra variants of the GTX Titan are rumored to be released sometime in 2013 / 2014. There has been no shortage of speculation about its price tag. Guru3D is predicting prices of $599 for the LE, $799 for the Titan, and $999 for the Ultra; 3DCenter is placing prices between $599 - $699 for the LE, $980 for the Titan, and over $1,000 for the Ultra.

Y además, ya se sabe más de la serie 700, en un principio sacan al menos 3 tarjetas, que vienen a sustituir la GTX680, 670 y 660Ti:
Report: Nvidia 700-Series to Release in May; More Specs

Report: Nvidia 700-Series to Release in May; More Specs
By Niels Broekhuijsen23 April 2013 21:32 - Source: BSN
Print

Some details have surfaced regarding Nvidia's upcoming 700-series dedicated graphics cards

There is a rumor on the web, initially reported by Brightsideofnews, that Nvidia will be launching its 700-series parts next month. Not only this, but a number of specifications have come to light as well. For starters, three SKUs will be released: the GTX 780, GTX 770, and GTX 760 Ti.

What was previously rumored to be the GTX Titan LE appears to actually be the GTX 780, which will likely be based on a cut-down GK110 part. As such, it will antiestéticature 2,496 CUDA cores, 208 Texture Mapping Units, 40 Render Output Units, and 5 GB of GDDR5 memory that will run over a 320-bit memory interface.

Moving on, the GTX 770 will be based on the older GK104 part, essentially being a higher clocked GTX 680 with double the graphics memory slapped onto the PCB for a total of 4 GB. The GTX 760 Ti would likely be almost identical to the GTX 670, with perhaps slightly different clock speeds.

___________GPU________Cuda Cores________TMUs________ROPs________Memory________Memory Interface

GTX 780______GK110________2,496________208________40________5 GB________320-bit
GTX 770______GK104-425________1,536________128________32________4 GB________256-bit
GTX 760 Ti____GK104-225________1,344________112________32________2 GB________256-bit

MSRP pricing for the GTX 780 is said to be between $499 and $599, the GTX 770 $399, and the GTX 760 Ti $299. While all of these details remain unconfirmed, it would be great if they are true.

Lo que quiere decir que lo más probable es que las tarjetas de la serie 600, así como las AMD/ATIs con las que compiten, vayan a bajar de precio (ahora mismo están en exactamente los mismos precios que menciona el artículo).

Y parecido con CPUs: Acaban de filtrarse (por ahora aún está en modo rumor) los precios de los Haswell de Intel:
Report: Intel Haswell CPU Pricing Possibly Leaked
Así que van a salir los i7-4770K y i5-4670K para competir con el FX-8350, entre otros.

O dicho de otra manera, un PC que, digamos, ahora cuesta 600 euros, va a costar 500 después del verano, y muy probablemente 400 para navidades, cuando salgan las nuevas consolas...

ienso: Ahora que me paro a pensarlo, vaya cara de pardillo se le debe de haber quedado a quien haya hecho caso de la afirmación de que no iban a sacar tarjetas nuevas hasta 2014 y se haya comprado una tarjeta del rango medio-alto...

ienso:

Edito: Y un vídeo de dinámica de fluídos rulando en PhysX en una GTX580, ya que estamos:
[YOUTUBE]6WZZARzpckw[/YOUTUBE]

"Pensamientos Ibéricos" · 24 Abr 2013