Hands LITERALLY On AMD Vega!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,008 words · ~5 min read
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AMD brought us to their suite at CES 2017 to show us a whole lot of
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incredibly cool things so I've got two demos behind me one of which is four
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radon Pro SSG graphics cards so these
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are the ones with the like one terabyte of sort of SSD cache on them which
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they've got running in raid for 4 terabytes they're working with a 200
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Gigabyte data set and they are rendering a photorealistic 4K image in damn near
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real time to put it in perspective a topend workstation working with that
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would be doing like one frame every 5 seconds but I know most of you guys are
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not into photo realistic image rendering
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as much as you're into gaming and that's where this demo comes in this right here
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is Doom at 4K Ultra settings I actually
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had to use some console commands in order to do it because they disabled
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Escape but they're like yes we are running ultra settings and it turns out
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it is indeed true tsaa time 8 3840 by
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2160 Vulcan Ultra it is the real deal
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right here running at Rock Solid over 60fps on an undisclosed name Vega GPU so
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there's four real pillars for Vega there's the new cache architecture which
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allows games to start using gigabytes or even terabyte scale data sets there's
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the new geometry pipeline which allows for an incredible number of polygons
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there's the new compute engine which they're calling ncu for next compute
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unit so that's pretty cool but basically 16bit data types are becoming super
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important for HDR in particular which is going to be one of the next big image
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quality improvements in gaming and finally there's a new pixel engine so
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they're calling it The draw stream binning rasterizer this cuts down on
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unnecessary memory fetches so say for example in a game like Doom normally the
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way the game is designed you would actually waste memory bandwidth drawing
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stuff that's behind the rocket launcher that is not going to be the case with
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this new approach and it won't require games to be Rewritten either which is
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pretty freaking cool so they're not discussing price point they're not
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discussing when it's shipping other than sometime in the first half of
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2017 but what they did let me do is they
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did let me hold one which is pretty freaking amazing and they have also
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allowed us to take the side panel off of
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the machine giving us our first look at
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running operating ryzen and Vega
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Hardware working together now I want to make it very very abundantly clear that
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the finished design will not have gaffer
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tape on it that is there so that AMD
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doesn't have all the you know um bathroom Engineers sitting on the can
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with their calculators on their their phones figuring out things like power
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draw for a product that is potentially up to 6 months away because it's not
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done yet as if the uh you know 3in you
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know EP extension on the back with a usb3 port on it wasn't enough of an
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indication on that subject a usb3 port on the inside of a
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graphics card I think I'm going to have to bring in an expert to explain to me
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why exactly we need one of those and what AMD is doing over
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here so here he is the man himself The
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Dropper of gpus here I'll give I'm going to put that in your pocket for
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safekeeping not going to let you hold it tell me about this so so so Linus uh
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this is the stuff that I'm most excited about on the GPU there are billions of
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transistors on the chip that you just put in my pocket but this kind of this
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this this thing is I'm super excited about this is only on engineering cards
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right this is not you're not going to see it on a product disappoint that
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looks so cool that looks so cool I think I'll make a special edition for you and
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for me like we'll make two cards okay of that thing but what this does is it
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gives every engineer in the company ability to monitor all the signals most
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importantly all power and electrical signals coming out of this GPU remotely
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with no overhead now every engineer including the guys who Test games the QA
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guys everybody inside uh AMD that has a
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Vaga can see what's going on at the detail level that's kind of what exite
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me is this in response to some of the criticism with polaris's power sort of
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yeah you know draw thing we we definitely you know want to get better
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uh at our uh you know power efficiency uh every generation we're putting money
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where our mouth is this is the overkill solution it's not I mean I think this is
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really really cool because our especially software Engineers now they
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can see what impact they're having on power in their uh you know in their
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whatever machine that you know they put aega in so that's kind of you know
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really cool kind of you know attachment uh I didn't expect us to be talking
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about that you know I expected us to be
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talking about kind of you know all the the four cool new architecture features
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and kind of and our battery died that was awkward
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but what's not awkward is this demo
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which is pretty freaking impressive so a huge thanks to Roger for telling us
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about the power monitoring huge thanks to AMD for allowing us to be down here
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at CES 2017 huge thanks to you for watching and don't forget to subscribe
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for more great videos from CES 2017