From ExtremeTech: AMD’s GPU roadmap has been substantially aligned to meet semi-custom needs ever since it won the PS4 and Xbox One contracts. In a piece earlier today, we actually explored some of those links and how they may have impacted AMD’s overall roadmap in the past five years. But the links may actually go deeper than we thought. There are reports that Navi isn’t just aligned to Sony’s roadmap — it’s a chip that AMD built explicitly for Sony, even when doing so pulled resources away from Vega.
This information, reported by Jason Evangelho at Forbes, would explain a few things. When AMD first talked about Vega at its Sonoma event in 2015, it stated Polaris would be a major GCN revamp, while Vega would be, if not a complete break with GCN, a full-scale, ground-up rearchitecting. While it’s true that Vega makes some significant changes to GCN and was obviously rebuilt to focus on hitting higher clock speeds, clock-for-clock, Vega isn’t much more efficient than GCN was in shipping titles.
Comparisons found gains of 1-5 percent for the newer architecture. That was much smaller than the gains we had expected, and it played a part in why Vega hasn’t been as effective a competitor against Nvidia’s GTX 1070 and 1080 GPUs as AMD might have liked. It also impacts the overall temperature and thermals of the AMD chips — remember, clock speed and power consumption don’t scale linearly, which is why the Radeon R9 Nano was vastly more power efficient than the Fury X while still being roughly 90 percent as fast. If Vega had gained more performance relative to Fury, AMD wouldn’t have had to run the chip’s clock as high, which directly translates to cooler, quieter cards.
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