Is AMD Gpus dying?

Volta's power consumption and HBM gamble are really hurting them. The price hike imparted by HBM and the extra power consumption really hurt them when trying to put the card into data centers.

That being said there is something there, the OpenCL increases, Rapid Packed Math, etc are all interesting developments. You can see though where having the smaller R&D budget hurt them though because they had the money to up compute power but not the money to iterate power efficiency down. Which is why Raj moving to Intel is probably better for him personally, since he can just go make a compute monster and then Intel can either give him additional R&D money or hire another team to address the power draw. Plus things like the outsourced drivers aren't helping.

I think AMD is going to step out of the game for high end for gaming. If efficiency off process improvements pans out and they can push power draw down there is a Vega product you can potentially put in a datacenter. For gaming though, the HBM2 prices just make it too easy for nVidia to counter with a GDDR Pascal card, especially this late into Pascal when this late into the generation Pascal is getting cheaper.

It will be interesting to see what Navi ends up lookig like. As shown by the Volta Titan, all that extra compute stuff ups costs (plus the clock speed dropped), so folks are theorizing a cut down for the gamer cards. Given AMD's more limited R&D resources I wonder if they might just push Navi at datacenters and continue to fight for control in the mass sales area (ex: RX680, etc) and not spend the money to make a gaming Navi for the high end gaming. If you're on limited resources it's honestly more attractive to get Navi into the hands of certain large companies and just sell bulk to them while catering to their needs rather than need to make driver updates every time a game comes out (plus those big companies tend to have skilled internal dev staffs as opposed game studios that are at times amazingly bad at optimizing and need a major bail out from the drivers).

/r/hardware Thread