SHINING POLARIS & PASCAL IMMINENT

Yeeeaah...funny times and goings on at the moment.

I have been perusing through webpages and expecting some benchmarking to come up of the imminent GPUs from both AMD and nVidia but not much has come out.

Ohh much has been said, that is sure enough, but nothing has come out.

The first thing I noticed was nVidia's surprise and knee-jerk reaction to all the talk about AMD's Polaris and some big claims were made. Only they weren't.

'Its got double the speed of that and this amount of power compared to this' was stated a lot. Except it was not quite how it was put across.

There is no doubt that it is way too early to call anything yet but what nVidia stated themselves was that the only way you were going to see these massive boosts in performance and that was if you already had or planning to purchase imminently a Virtual Reality headset. Oh and that those threee short sentences about the nVidia 1070? What was up with that? Weird.

Many got so giddy headed that they failed to note that the up and coming nVidia 1080 GPU was around 30% up on the nVidia 980Ti. Yeah that is good ... ish. It certainly is not double!

In the red corner you have the fans by the ring side giving up theories of the advancement in power of the imminent AMD Polaris 10 GPU. Also predicting whether or not these cards will be Radeon 480's with the 'X' prefix or not and that the 480 will be as fast as the Radeon 390.

Some are saying more.

I will go on record to state I am going to side with the 'more' camp and that a fraction over a Fury card might be the case.

This is a big lithography jump and if you say that Pascal is a shrunk Maxwell card and has 30% then you can say that the new node brings 30% improvements. Except, no in AMD's case.

Because they have changed and added several things to the GCN GPUs.

They themselves have stated it is the biggest jump n their history. They are not stupid enough to repeat what happened with bulldozer which was more than many tech journalists made out anyway. Ergo, you can game on an AMD A10-7850K APU. Simply stating that you cannot game on said chip is quite simply untrue.

The same is true of the FX chips but yes they did not turn out quite as I had envisioned. I thought the very idea was sound but went wrong in the process somewhere. I also put it down to desperation because, and as I stated, the new node shrinks were taking longer than they had previously.

This even put Moore's Law on the brink of collapse, though he only stated it would last ten years and was a great prediction.

We are now on the brink of an amazing 6 months of tech gold and then some!

Two GPUs with Pascal and Polaris and then there is Zen. Throw in the node shrink and it is all good, though I am very interested indeed in the latter two from AMD. Am interested in Pascal, do not get me wrong but would be more so had they announced loads of core level changes as AMD have done.

Then there will be the HBM 2 chips and everyone keeps stating that it wont be ready until September? Err yeeeah that is HBM 2. What about HBM 1? This is just a die shrink after all which is not what HBM 2 is. Not in my opinion but I could be wrong here. These are on top of the GPUs when they are grown, so surely the same HBM is the same lithography and I see HBM 2 as having other things improved. Like the interconnects? Maybe higher stacks?

The way I see it is that the one I am more interested in waiting for, which is AMD's Vega though I am also interested in say a 1080Ti or a Titan Z and what they can do, Vega is the one I am likely to be if my theories are correct and I have read everything right?

Oh and Vega in October?! *CHOMP-CHOMP-CHOMP* Feck it! No fingernails!

Deus Ex Mankind Divided in August, Radiohead album out imminently and I even had an extra album not long ago from my very much loved Pink Floyd. Another Amused to Death style album from Roger Waters and I think I just might die this year?!

LMAO!

Oh...my...god and then there are the movies!

Oh and the Blu-Ray releases like Batman v Superman and all the info about Justice League that will come out? Doctor Strange.

Possibly a surprise Mass Effect release and I am even seeing rumours about Elder Scrolls VI Argonia and a possible release or announcement?! WHAT?!?!

Oh-oh-oh and then there are the Playstation Neo and XBTwo announcements?! Awww I can't call it X-Bone any more? Oh darn it!

So much is going to be occurring I am not sure if I will be able to keep up?!

Where did I PUT those damned blood pressure pills?!

WITCHER 3 - IMPOSSIBLE INSECTOID ... CRAB ... BOSS ... THINGEY!

LMAO!

So ... I went back to The Witcher 3 ... forgotten all the controls it had been so long and forgot about this!

Then I remembered why I had stopped playing it last time!

I clearly am not levelled up enough to beat this large Insectoid or crab like creature ... but ... I am bloody stubborn and would have given it fifty attempts and then exited the game with no interest go go back and try again. Well on the last fifty attempts that is, lol.

I think now I remember I quite the game to keep the upload small to show I am back in this game and will have to go to an earlier save before we go off to kill this thing.

The problem is I am thinking this was a mission I started and at the same time pointing out another problem, along with the tiny effects I have had on this creature, did get its life energy down to 50% at my best attempt, that ... wizard, or whatever he is, stands their attacking it for ages and has no effect on the creature whatsoever.

That's a bit pants to be honest, lol. Might as well not even be there!

Still, I will go to an earlier save, which I really hate having to do, and try and get back into this and remember where I am, what missions I had to do, where in the story I was and recall the controls, lol.

Well it has been longer than 6 months since I played it last, I did not even expect to be at home, or in the same home, about now.

And remember ... I have memory problems ... and do not take that as me being STUPID as that is not what it means.

As you can see from my other videos or my fourteen blogs ... I have a degree in applied computing and am expert in herpetology, batrachology, ichthyology, orhidaceae, astronomy, astrophysics and I even know Wing Chun.

Lol, too many people, trolls and fanboys are far too quick to make immediate assumptions about people on the Internet and I would rather just try and avoid all that up front. LMAO!

I completed Deus Ex Human Revolution again, hoping it would last me up until Mankind Divided in August, or close. But I whizzed through it far quicker than I expected too and wish I had upped the difficulty on it?!

I think I uploaded some Deus Ex stuff?

Darn it!!

I notice now my earlier prediction of the Nintendo NX is having unconfirmed leaks appearing that it is to use AMD's Polaris. Hearing this about the PS4.5 thing and the XBOne.5 too.

Well if I recall they did state when they designed the PS4 and XBOne that they did so with the idea of upgrading being easier. I did think of them improving it but thought it more likely they were talking about backwards compatibility with the PS5 and XBTwo with the previous generations for the older games.

But I also did state that in my opinion they sounded well under powered too.

All this has to do with the fact that the previous generations had been out a very long time and the chip lithography shrinkage, node shrink/chip shrink, from 28 nanometres to 16 and 14 nanometres was way, way later than previous in arriving. Unless you went solely to Intel for CPUs, way over priced, and GPUs, way underpowered, for your chips.

Yeah right, lol, no one in their right minds would do that, especially wanting to sell the machines/consoles for well under £500. You can pay double that just for a decent, not half decent but decent, Intel CPU. For me that is an 8 core, Core i7. A four core and eight thread CPU would be a half decent one in my book. But the prices! OK to begin with bit pricey but they have stayed high ...

..or at least will until AMD's Zen 6, 8 and 16 core CPUs arrive and then it will go mad for about 6 months to two years!

Surprised that the AM4 motherboards have not appeared on retail listings as they were meant to arrive in March and it is now mid April.

I could regurgitate everything that is said or leaked on here but I am not going to do that. I absolutely hate it when people and websites do that and I am always seeing the same crap over and over. If I hate it then I simply will not do this myself.

The latest seems to suggest that the Polaris chips will arrive around June or July time and Zen around October to November time?

I fully expect that these chips will be faster than the 390's by some margin. I also expect that Vega with HBM2 will arrive around December to February at the latest and will be so fast that we will have to pick up our chins?!

I fully expect a big improvement from nVidia but reading between the lines it seems likely that they will be a step behind AMD this time around? Likely not far behind but behind is what I expect them to be.

As totally natural for nVidia's Pascal to be fairly swifter than their old cards, plus rumour of them ceasing Maxwell production, along with AMD's confidence and string of design wins, companies all lining up to use Polaris and Vega, is why I am expecting old 390's to be eating the dust of Polaris 10 and 11.

I still want to wait for Vega though to pair with a 16 or 8 core Zen, whichever the larger core count turns out to be.

Though I wont be using an APU this time around I am also very interested to see an APU using Zen along with what graphics they use on the chip, how it pairs up with a graphics card on Crossfire along with all the heterogenous compute stuff, which is improved over previous APU's and I would like to see this fully exploited to see what it can do?

Imagine an AMD APU with 8 Zen cores and also able to use the cores from the integrated GPU for normal computing tasks?! I wonder if we will ever see 16 Zen cores and an integrated GPU?!

Ooh would you look at that? I have dribbled all over my keyb ... *

THE COMING OF THE NEXT GENERATION

Well it's been quiet on the news front.

Well that is if you don't count the announcement that AMD AM4 motherboards were going on sale in March, umm last month, which every single computer tech site religiously copied.

Then there was the site claiming to have benchmarks for an engineering sample of AMD's next generation, in everything way, CPU called Zen. I then couldn't help but check the date and she enough it was the 1st April!

The aforementioned websites of course then copied said website and everyone was reporting it.

Supposed to be tech journalists? What tossers.

What's hilarious is that they all copy each other and then can't help themselves blowing their I own bugles when the copied report turns out to be correct. Don't mention when they got it wrong though, funny that.

What makes the April fools joke a pain is that for at least a week the pages reporting this keep coming up in the first few pages of search results. Morons keep commenting on it so many keep coming up for weeks! Great!

Annoyingly they also don't take the effing pages down either, click baiting much?

But it's getting ever closer to many early presents appearing what with Deus Ex Mankind Divided with AMD's GPU Polaris arriving just prior or about the same time. Then shortly after AMD's Zen should appear finally and by that time the new m.2 and NVMe drives should be hitting a good place and price?

Hopefully by this time some more games should have been announced, maybe even some being coded with the next generation graphics cards in mind?

Oh course there is nVidia's Pascal GPU and HBM should be getting somewhere by then. Perhaps AMD's Vega GPU won't be too far behind all of these things?

They seem to be starting off late that it will be Vega that will have HBM 2.0 and be the replacement to AMD's Fiji graphics cards?

I'm hoping for some serious competition between AMD and nVidia on the graphics card front and AMD and Intel on the CPU front?

That would be cool! Very, very cool!

Also mouth watering from Intel, for once in a blue moon, was that new Xeon CPU with 22 cores and 44 threads, I think it was. I think the price was in the region of $4,000 though?!

Cor blimey! Nice though!

Now if I can just pick out the six winning numbers on the lottery one week!

I can remember drooling over single core chips and Intel having dual CPU socket motherboards! Now you can get 22 cores on a single chip!

Now with the die and node shrink shook we need for done very good time I'd for AMD to push the envelope beyond 8 cores on the consumer front and ... well, oh boy what good times will roll.

Probably won't happen immediately but it won't take much or very long for a rush between the two of them to outdo reach other on the consumers front.

Wasn't interested in any Intel chips, I don't believe what they report as it's shite, but that Xeon ... ooooh boy, lol.

Now just counting down the months until some engineering sample benchmarks start appearing.

Funny as we have not had much in the easy of excitement but now we are looking at 4 or 5 chips, at least, over the next 6 to 8 months. Polaris, Vega, Zen, Pascal and whatever Intel will introduce as a knee jerk to Zen? They, Intel, have to do it, you just know they will.

Let the good times roll!