Tuesday, September 20th 2016
AMD Vega 10, Vega 20, and Vega 11 GPUs Detailed
AMD CTO, speaking at an investors event organized by Deutsche Bank, recently announced that the company's next-generation "Vega" GPUs, its first high-end parts in close to two years, will be launched in the first half of 2017. AMD is said to have made significant performance/Watt refinements with Vega, over its current "Polaris" architecture. VideoCardz posted probable specs of three parts based on the architecture.
AMD will begin the "Vega" architecture lineup with the Vega 10, an upper-performance segment part designed to disrupt NVIDIA's high-end lineup, with a performance positioning somewhere between the GP104 and GP102. This chip is expected to be endowed with 4,096 stream processors, with up to 24 TFLOP/s 16-bit (half-precision) floating point performance. It will feature 8-16 GB of HBM2 memory with up to 512 GB/s memory bandwidth. AMD is looking at typical board power (TBP) ratings around 225W.Next up, is "Vega 20." This is one part we've never heard of today, and it's likely scheduled for much later. "Vega 20" is a die-shrink of Vega 10 to the 7 nm GF9 process being developed by GlobalFoundries. It will feature 4,096 stream processors, too, but likely at higher clocks, up to 32 GB of HBM2 memory running full-cylinders at 1 TB/s, PCI-Express gen 4.0 bus support, and a typical board power of 150W.
The "Vega 11" part is a mid-range chip designed to replace "Polaris 10" from the product-stack, and offer slightly higher performance at vastly better performance/Watt. AMD is expecting to roll out the "Navi" architecture some time in 2019, and so AMD will hold out for the next two years with "Vega." There's even talk of a dual-GPU "Vega" product featuring a pair of Vega 10 ASICs.
Source:
VideoCardz
AMD will begin the "Vega" architecture lineup with the Vega 10, an upper-performance segment part designed to disrupt NVIDIA's high-end lineup, with a performance positioning somewhere between the GP104 and GP102. This chip is expected to be endowed with 4,096 stream processors, with up to 24 TFLOP/s 16-bit (half-precision) floating point performance. It will feature 8-16 GB of HBM2 memory with up to 512 GB/s memory bandwidth. AMD is looking at typical board power (TBP) ratings around 225W.Next up, is "Vega 20." This is one part we've never heard of today, and it's likely scheduled for much later. "Vega 20" is a die-shrink of Vega 10 to the 7 nm GF9 process being developed by GlobalFoundries. It will feature 4,096 stream processors, too, but likely at higher clocks, up to 32 GB of HBM2 memory running full-cylinders at 1 TB/s, PCI-Express gen 4.0 bus support, and a typical board power of 150W.
The "Vega 11" part is a mid-range chip designed to replace "Polaris 10" from the product-stack, and offer slightly higher performance at vastly better performance/Watt. AMD is expecting to roll out the "Navi" architecture some time in 2019, and so AMD will hold out for the next two years with "Vega." There's even talk of a dual-GPU "Vega" product featuring a pair of Vega 10 ASICs.
194 Comments on AMD Vega 10, Vega 20, and Vega 11 GPUs Detailed
Also, of tremendous importance is that this is an investors conference so they need to say all the absolute best things.
I have a bad feeling about Vega. Even if it's better than GTX1080, AMD are saying it won't beat Titan X?
Sad face.
Is Global Foundries really that close to 7nm? How can GloFo be making such rapid improvements when Intel appears to be stuck? If this is accurate (I'd gander that Vega 20 is smoke and mirrors), GloFo could pass up Intel in process tech and that's quite unfathomable.
AMD not having an answer to Pascal for another three quarters is dire news. Vega 10 is no doubt beyond Pascal's reach but by the time it launches, it will have to contend with Volta.
If AMD's goal is to Nano (huge chip, low power) their entire product line up, that eats directly into AMD's profit margins. This news post is making me...
AMD really has to prove itself to us now.
Nvidia can easily charge $800 for their next mid range GV 104.
I think the market may very well turn around in AMD's favor. AMD is positioned a LOT better at the moment and they are making efforts to get into the picture for new markets, or already are in it, for example: consoles (again, PS4Pro and Scorpio), APIs, and custom SOCs. AMD is also becoming much more 'lean' than Intel and the funny thing is that AMD is actually ahead of Intel with regards to streamlining the company.
However in terms of process nodes, we know that the '7nm' and FD-SOI processes are not a 'real' node shrink in the original sense of the word. Intel still currently has the smallest 'real' node even on 14nm.
About Vega 10, positioning between GP104 and GP102 seems like a very smart move because by Q2 2017 the GP104 and GP102 will have aged abit. They will probably push that GPU as the bang/buck high end offering and do another HD7950 with it, probably leaning heavily on overclockability to push it towards GP102. With current pricing, the GP104 and GP102 won't be selling like hotcakes anyway and the only way they will sell bigger numbers is through price drops. AMD only needs to position their GPU just a little bit better and they will offer the HBM2 product versus the GDDR5 product that no one was really waiting for, but at a similar price point and with the added advantage of being 9 months newer than its competitors (this matters, look at all those who sold a 980ti to get an almost similar and situationally even weaker 1070).
Look at how Fury X excels on certain games in newer APIs and you can see how HBM2 on an even wider GPU will absolutely be king of the hill, making positioning between 104 and 102 more of a worst case scenario than anything else. In addition, all that matters for AMD is that they push large amounts of products with a little bit of margin, not some Titan XP equivalent for the halo effect that will be out of the picture for 99% of the potential market.
To compete, you don't need the top end product, you just need a product people want to buy.
"with up to 24 TFLOP/s 16-bit (half-precision) floating point performance"
Obviously reducing the compute side increases gaming usability, as proven by Nvidia cards doing the same.
AMD is open-sourcing virtually all of its APIs. That's great for Linux but that isn't going to translate to profits for AMD. Well it could because AMD is more appealing now on Linux but realize we're talking about a minority of minority of systems here. It's a DirectX 12 thing. Some things, especially textures, don't require 32-bits of precision. At 16-bit, it should be able to process two calculations for the price of one.
Developers aren't using 16-bit because hardware support is iffy. Five years from now, 16-bits to handle textures will likely become common place.
1) By "skipping 10nm to save time" (lol)
2) "Collaboration with IBM" magic (lol)
“We are well positioned to deliver a differentiated 7nm FinFET technology by tapping our years of experience manufacturing high-performance chips, the talent and know-how of our former IBM Microelectronics colleagues and the world-class R&D pipeline from our research alliance. No other foundry can match this legacy of manufacturing high-performance chips.”
3) Cause VCDZ made it up (welp)
However:
“The technology is expected to be ready for customer product design starts in the second half of 2017, with ramp to risk production in early 2018”.
techfrag.com/2016/09/16/7nm-finfet-chip-production/ Other explanations can exist.
Consoles are rather weaksauce so it makes sense/you are forced to optimized for them.
As for PC, oh well, dudes can buy another 1.5$k card, who fecks. Amen.
And we need AMD to get back into game.
We can only hope that AMD pull a rabbit out of the hat with DX12 performance, as we've seen one or two benchmarks show a significant performance increase. Somehow I suspect that NVIDIA is gonna neutralize that advantage though.
If so I am reading 512GB/s and 12 TFLOPs. That would put it at or slightly above the Titan.
What? No wood screws?
Otherwise note that this will have 12 TFLOPS vs 11 of the Titan X, and 512 - 1 TB/s of bandwidth beats the 480 of the Titan X. Even if it doesn't soundly beat the Titan X, it will easily trade blows if these specs are true.
P.S. Where is this 512 GB/s coming from? HBM2 comes in 720 GB/s and 1 TB/s flavors so I am calling BS on that spec.
AMD is skating to where the puck is, not where it will be :(
Also, first half of 2017 can easily turn into a July or back-to-school launch. Oh well, I wasn't planning on buying any of these anyway.
EDIT:
People dramatizing like crazy again, not realizing even Fury X runs all current games at 4K over 30fps. I'd say that's pretty damn good considering it's last year's card. Whatever Vega will be, you can be assured it'll run things well even if it's not absolute king of the hill.