Hollywood, not miners, gobbling up Radeon RX Vega supply

I remember AMD starting off their Ryzen Tech Day earlier this month in LA talking about how cryptocurrency miners are eating up all of the global GPU stock of Radeon RX series graphics cards. They were careful in launching their AMD Radeon RX Vega series of cards with miners waiting with bated breath on Vega performance.

Then came the #FakeNews that AMD Radeon RX Vega was pushing 100MH/s mining Ethereum, and anyone who mines Ethereum (like myself) knows that was pure "Hollywood magic", a spectacle. A performance; something that wasn't real, but perceived, as real. This turned out to be so completely unfounded, as I'm looking to my left and seeing the top of the line Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition and it is only pushing 33.6MH/s... This is only one-third of what the #FakeNews on RX Vega 64 mining performance.

But now Digital Trends has a story about AMD "Radeon" Studios, which is one of the better moves that AMD has done in the last couple of years - something you can read about here. One of the facts of Radeon Studios is Project 47, another one of the better things AMD has done in the last couple of years. Project 47 is a beast of a PC that has 1 petaflop of performance... perfect for Hollywood level operations.

AMD has also created something it calls RS1, which is a system that has been built specifically for 8K rendering on the cheap. It uses 2 x AMD EPYC server processors, and 4 x high-end Radeon Vega or Radeon Pro SSG cards for up to 100 TFLOPs of half-precision compute performance. AMD Corporate Vice President, Roy Taylor, explains that the new RS1 system costs half as much as an Intel/NVIDIA powered rendering system.

AMD's new "Radeon" Studios division will also have their Project 47 server rack available soon, powered by 20 x EPYC processors and 18 x Vega GPUs. AMD will be leasing out, or selling Project 47 servers for production houses.

But this brings us to what the headline teased you about: miners are not gobbling up Vega GPUs as the world - and AMD, are telling you. If what AMD is saying here is true, and I somewhat believe them, Vega is a 4K/8K rendering powerhouse that Hollywood not only wants, but needs for the future. If Vega is so good, AMD's global supplies are going to be overwhelmed with orders for RS1 and Project 47 server racks that Vega GPU production will be strangled by the throat like the rubber chicken being paraded on stage during a product launch.

Vega GPUs aren't being gobbled up by miners because the Ethereum mining performance is abysmal when you take into consideration the mammoth power consumption, heat output, and noise. Vega GPUs are being gobbled up by Hollywood, but the smoke and mirrors of blame are being used perfectly, where miners are getting all of the blame.

Miners are too busy converting everything over to GTX 1060s and GTX 1070s, something that I did because of their superior performance/power consumption numbers. AMD Radeon RX Vega on the other hand, while it mines well (28MH/s for the RX Vega 56 with no tweaks), it is not a 100MH/s champion.

AMD also recently pushed out their mining-specific performance optimized drivers, shooing away gamers who want to purchase Vega. It seems like mining is to blame for Vega GPU stock, and global GPU stock as a whole, but with AMD putting this much time and effort into marketing Radeon for Hollywood... I'm going to have to blame the Spielberg's, Abrams, Cameron's, and probably even Game of Thrones for this. Sigh.