Tuesday, May 16th 2017
AMD Announces Radeon Vega Frontier Edition - Not for Gamers
Where is Vega? When is it launching? On AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2017, Raja Koduri spoke about the speculation in the past few weeks, and brought us an answer: Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is the first iteration of Vega, aimed at data scientists, immersion engineers and product designers. It will be released in the second half of June for AMD's "pioneers". The wording, that Vega Frontier Edition will be released in the second half of June, makes it so that AMD still technically releases Vega in the 2H 2017... It's just not the consumer, gaming Vega version of the chip. This could unfortunately signify an after-June release time-frame for consumer GPUs based on the Vega micro-architecture.
This news comes as a disappointment to all gamers who have been hoping for Vega for gaming, because it reminds of what happened with dual Fiji. A promising design which ended up unsuitable for gaming and was thus marketed for content creators as Radeon Pro Duo, with little success. But there is still hope: it just looks like we really will have to wait for Computex 2017 to see some measure of details on Vega's gaming prowess.
Vega Frontier Edition is the Vega GPU we've been seeing in leaks in the last few weeks, packing 16 GB of HBM2 memory, which, as we posited, didn't really make much sense on typical gaming workloads. But we have to say that if AMD's Vega truly does deliver only a 1.5x improvement in FP32 performance (the one that's most critical for gaming at the moment), this probably paints AMD's Vega as fighting an uphill battle against NVIDIA's Pascal architecture (probably ending up somewhere between GTX 1070 and GTX 1080). If these are correct, this could mean a dual GPU Vega is indeed in the works, so as to allow AMD to reclaim the performance crown from NVIDIA, albeit with a dual-GPU configuration against NVIDIA's current single-chip performance king, Titan Xp. Also worth nothing is that the AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition uses two PCI-Express 8-pin power connectors, which suggests a power draw north of 300 Watts.
For now, it seems AMD actually did its best to go all out on the machine learning craze, looking for the higher profits that are available in the professional market segment than on the consumer side of graphics. Let's just hope they didn't do so at the expense of gaming performance leaps.
After an initial throwback to AMD's times since he became lead of Radeon Technologies Group, where Raja mentioned the growing amount of graphics engineers in AMD, including their commitment to the basics of graphics computing: power, performance, and software. Better basics in hardware, software, and marketing are things that Raja says are responsible for AMD's current market outlook, both from a gamer and content creator perspective, which led to an increase in AMD's graphics marketshare.
RTG's chapter two of Radeon Rising, going beyond the basics, will allow the company to go after premium market dollars, with an architecture that excels on both gaming and CAD applications. Raja Koduri said he agreed with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in that at some point in the future, every single human being will be a gamer.
The final configuration of Vega was finalized some two years ago, and AMD's vision for it was to have a GPU that could plow through 4K resolutions at over 60 frames per second. And Vega has achieved it. Sniper Elite 4 at over 60 FPS on 4K. Afterwards, Raja talked about AMD's High Bandwidth Cache Controller, running Rise of the Tomb Raider, giving the system only 2 GB of system memory, with the HBCC-enabled system delivering more than 3x the minimum frame-rates than the non-HBCC enabled system, something we've seen in the past, though on Deus Ex: mankind Divided. So now we know that wasn't just a single-shot trick.
Raja Koduri then showed AMD's SSG implementation and how it works on a fully ray-traced environment, with the SSG system delivering much smoother transitions in the system. AMD worked with Adobe on integrating SSG capability into Adobe Premiere Pro.
Raja then jumped towards machine intelligence, which Raja believes will be dominated not by the GPU (NVIDIA's green) or CPU (Intel blue) paths, but in true heterogeneous computing.
Raja took to stage results on DeepBench, a machine learning benchmark where NVIDIA dominates at the moment, joking about AMD's absence from the benchmark - since they really didn't have a presence in this area. In a benchmark, AMD pitted Vega against NVIDIA's P100 architecture (interestingly, not against NVIDIA's recently announced V100 architecture, which brings many specific improvements to this kind of workloads), delivering an almost 30% performance lead.
This news comes as a disappointment to all gamers who have been hoping for Vega for gaming, because it reminds of what happened with dual Fiji. A promising design which ended up unsuitable for gaming and was thus marketed for content creators as Radeon Pro Duo, with little success. But there is still hope: it just looks like we really will have to wait for Computex 2017 to see some measure of details on Vega's gaming prowess.
After an initial throwback to AMD's times since he became lead of Radeon Technologies Group, where Raja mentioned the growing amount of graphics engineers in AMD, including their commitment to the basics of graphics computing: power, performance, and software. Better basics in hardware, software, and marketing are things that Raja says are responsible for AMD's current market outlook, both from a gamer and content creator perspective, which led to an increase in AMD's graphics marketshare.
91 Comments on AMD Announces Radeon Vega Frontier Edition - Not for Gamers
venturebeat.com/2017/05/09/nvidia-plans-to-train-100000-developers-on-deep-learning-ai-in-2017/
They are also in 50 million cars, aren't they?
"Much faster than 480" lol.Come on, more expensive, more power hungry, SLOWER Prescott outsold Athlon 64.
God knows what "market share" is shown on your picture, which country it is and if it is number of units or revenue. I'd bet on the former.
Why should they follow Nvidias release cycle and make a bigger and better card than Nvidia has as their top tier card ? It isent where the money is, thats mainstream gaming and not in the enthusiast sigment.
Just look at RX480/580 they have done well and made a lot of much needed money for AMD, and belive me when I predict next quarters financial status of AMD, is going to be a hell of a lot better with Ryzen sale numbers comming out, and now Vega to fuel the GFX department after.
I for one dosent like early leaks, fake news, call it whatever you want, the public dosent have a right to know until release date, and I second that 100%.
For the moment, if you want the best of the best, just go green camp(GFX1080TI), its over priced in most countries anyway.
If Vega can compete within a margin of 5% with a lower pricetag, I would say its a slamdunk. Just let the top tier cards all belong to Nvidia. Let them use a lot of money on developing a new arkitecture just for the bragging rights, and low profit pr unit, then you fill up the mainstream section with competive alternatives and make a much better profit pr unit in the end, I really like this a lot:clap:, since AMD has been bleeding a lot of money which they need to come back again.
Similar story with Fermi outselling fantastic products AMD had. (can't blame this one on strongarming though, basically underdog always has to fight an uphill battle)
There is something about "their own fault" narrative I simply cannot grasp.
It helped stem the bleeding from a power monster and set them up well.
As for the chart that's the world Wide one that was posted on tpu not even like two months ago... So I don't know ask the news editors?
It's amazing what AMD has been able to accomplish in the David vs. Goliath competition with Intel and Nvidia. But the reality is that there's no way with their relatively tiny R&D they can hang with them. Marketing is cheap by comparison and AMD is great at that. So over and over it's the same story with incredible claims pre-release that get people salivating, and then varying degrees of let down and defending AMD after release. AMD is to be commended for what they've been able to do. But I'd be kicking myself had I been waiting for a year now for Vega to learn it's both delayed again in gaming form, and that it's a professional card first.
@efikkan yes and no....nothing concrete just things to majkere assumptions on again.
Remember I ran two of these prior to my 1080ti. They were some of the better cards out there. They were also hot, loud and slower than one Ti.
Now with a bios mod I have already seen over 380w worth of consumption from my Ti, but that's a far cry less than the 520w I saw from my pair of 480's.
Raja himself said that two 480's was more efficient than a 1080.
RX VEGA probably has half the HBM memory, but something is obviously problem at the red team unable to deliver VEGA volume in time resorting in *limited edition pro card launch. Niche product is all good and well, but AMD needs the next thing for the gaming masses or NVIDIA can cash cow yet another holiday season.