AMD Vega10 Update from Hot Chips 2017

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zir_blazer

Active Member
Dec 5, 2016
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No chance SR IOV is coming to the desktop line of Vega?
If you google around, chances are that you will find me ranting about that in other places.
AMD confirmed that it did not include SR-IOV as a feature in the Vega based consumer Radeons, and it seems that the Frontier Edition doesn't support it, either. SR-IOV wasn't mentioned for the Polaris based Radeon Pro WX 4100/5100/7100, which seems to be the Workstation FirePro replacement. So far, AMD is reserving SR-IOV only for their expensive FirePro Server series, quite far from what mainstream passthrough users can afford.
Vega sucks in some critical aspects (Performance per Watt is catastrophic, it can deliver GF1080 performance but at twice the power consumption) and it would have really helped AMD if they had a irreplaceable feature to add value. Allowing to use SR-IOV for 2-4 VFs in their 500 U$D consumer Radeons (Or maybe use licenses like nVidia, to make people accept that they are not running commercial streaming services?), doesn't seem like it could cannibalize too much the FirePros and it could have made Vega look really good as a niche product.

Considering that Intel has been working on mediated Passthrough with XenGT/KVMGT/iGVT-g and it supports using the integrated GPU for 4/8 instances, one can only dream that AMD decides to include SR-IOV in their Zen based APUs just to maintain feature parity with Intel. So far, Intel doesn't seem to restrict it, but I suppose that when the feature is complete and mature, Intel will do market segmentation with it like they always do.
 
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