AMD has teased more information about its
forthcoming Vega-based graphics cards, revealing that they will come with
either 4GB or 8GB memory and hinting that a launch is imminent.
Both versions will use the second-generation
high-bandwidth memory (HBM2), which in addition to offering improved memory
bandwidth will also provide greater power efficiency - something AMD cards have
been lacking as of late.
Scott Herkelman, vice president and general manager
of Radeon gaming at AMD, suggested that 4GB of HBM2 Vega graphics card memory
could potentially have similar memory bandwidth to Nvidia's 11GB GTX 1080 Ti,
although we'll believe that when we see the independent benchmarks.
More plausibly, he added that Radeon RX Vega
graphics cards ought to be smaller than some of the AMD graphics cards that
have been shipped of late, particularly the £200 stop-gap Polaris 10-based RX
480s, which appeared in the middle of last year.
This was produced on GlobalFoundries' 14nm FinFET
process and was very much a 'warm up' in advance of the slew of Vega-based GPUs
that AMD had promised for the second quarter of 2017. With the second quarter
just weeks away, and AMD in the habit of launching stuff at the beginning of
quarters, the first of AMD's long-awaited new Vegas ought to be seeing the
light of day very shortly.
The news was revealed at AMD's Tech Summit in China
over the weekend.
The company also revealed plans to push into gaming
laptops, given the more compact nature of the GPUs that the company is
planning, although heat dissipation will (of course) also be a factor there.
What wasn't revealed were core configurations and
clock speeds, and whether the company will offer essentially the same device at
different levels of performance and form-factors (and prices, natch). The Vega
is AMD's response to Nvidia's 10-series, a new GPU architecture designed to
take advantage of the latest 14nm and 16nm chip manufacturing processes. It's
very much the 'second foot to fall' in AMD's 2017 comeback tour, which appears
to be going splendidly so far.
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