Note: AMD Radeon HD 6950 was released in year 2010 with 2.64 billion transistors. AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT was released in year 2020 with 26.80 billion transistors.
> AMD should not continue to increase model numbers. Doing so can decrease performance across a variety of metrics, as data from the HD 6950 and RX 6900 XT shows. Instead, they should hold the model number in place or even decrease it to ensure future generations perform optimally.
I've run over 120k AMD GPUs. They are ALL snowflakes. Even within the same model number, no two are the same and they can vary quite a bit in performance. It is actually kind of wild to see this at scale. We called it the 'silicon lottery'.
I started to write code to gather data on location on the wafer that it was printed on to see if I could do a correlation there (as I heard a rumor that that the edges aren't as good), but sadly never got a chance to finish it up.
I've noticed this to some extent with their CPUs as well.
From what I can tell this is, in part, because AMD run their chips much closer to their physical limits than say, Intel or Nvidia do. They're all redlining so to speak.
As such this means that any differences in the silicon are much more likely to have an impact on performance.
I can't make sense of this. CPUs microarchitecture is run at their clock speed. If they're running close to their physical limits, either they don't fail in which case all's well, or they fail in which case it's a wipeout such as a blue screen, reboot, freezes, corruption or whatever. AFAICS they can't run correctly but somehow slower. Be good if you could explain where I'm getting it wrong.
“Some of this can be attributed to the process node too. On that note, TSMC’s 40 nm process has a bigger number than their 7 nm process. But again, bigger numbers don’t help.”
The 6950 was my first powerful graphics card. It was a great card
I bought it used on eBay & it had already been abused. One day it died, and the company that made it told me they had no replacements, so they sent me a brand new 7950 no questions asked.
That company was MSI. I went on to recommend MSI to others for years because of that incident & one other good reason.
Then in 2016 MSI dicked me on a $2200 laptop that had an ungodly amount of issues straight from the factory any decent company would RMA. The amount of reports on the internet about those specific models having issues were insane, & the company just did not care in the slightest.
I’ve since denounced MSI after that. I presume MBAs had at some time taken over & ran customer service into the ground.
I still have the old 6950 in storage somewhere.
Some point about how to both gain and lose a customer in this text, I think. I mean, over-tightening a laptops hinges in the factory, to the point they one day suddenly & catastrophically fail, dropping your 1440p 120hz screen - knowing of the issue & not informing customers, let alone an RMA - is just fukt. and that was only one of the many, many issues (coil whine & completely inadequate cooling being some others)
Knew I was in for a ride when I saw "VLIW". Fun to see how a card that old still has competitive compute throughput for certain workloads (obviously, it falls short in many other areas)
AMD's naming is rough. I upgraded from an FX 6300 to a Ryzen 3600 a few years ago and it still hurts my brain keeping which one is which straight.
Interestingly on paper the two chips look surprisingly similar - they're both 6 cores at ~3.5Ghz. Multi threading and modern IPC make a big difference!
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-hd-6950.c405 , https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-6900-xt.c348...