neurosisxeno
Member
It's mostly based on the showcases AMD has put on. They have shown off a "top of the line" Vega card playing (I believe) Doom at 4K at 60fps, and we know from dozens of third party benchmarks that a 1080 can almost hit that mark with a 1080ti passing it and Titan Xp going well above it. Not 100% certain on the game, but I know it was a specific title from the last 9-12 months at 4k/60fps, and there are already cards on the market that can manage that.
In all likelihood the Vega cards will compete with the 1070 and 1080, and trade blows with the 1080ti at the high end. The problem for AMD is, I see no way HBM2-equipped cards make them more money per card than Nvidia makes off the 1070, 1080, and 1080ti. Not to mention those 3 cards will have been out for months and even years before the Vega cards hit shelves--and the first batch is a very limited release.
There's a Reddit post that estimates the size since AMD has not released any solid numbers. The 525mm^2 is Computerbase.de's estimate based on the documented size of the HBM2 stacks courtesy of JEDEC. So it's somewhere between 475 and 525 by most estimates, which still makes it smaller than Hawaii, and that's just for the GPU die. Including the HBM2 stacks it's probably closer to 600mm^2. AMD cards tend to be less space efficient than Nvidia cards because they feature a lot more compute hardware on there--hence why the 7970/290X/390X were all much better at Bitcoin mining. Nvidia striped a lot of that away going from Fermi to Kepler, and focused instead on streamlined gaming performance since it was a lot easier to market and cut cost substantially.
AMD has been making efforts to expand. The Frontier line of Vega cards that they announced is the first major push outside of the traditional GPU markets that they work within--a challenger to Nvidia's Tesla cards which make them a lot of money. AMD has also announced some deals for datacenters as far as I remember.
