Professional workloads are known to tax graphics cards like few do (well, Furmark would beg to differ, wouldn't it), and AMD is looking to cover all of its bases when it comes to the liquid cooling needs of its pioneers, its graphics professionals that will get a taste of Vega before any other consumer.

In the Q&A section of their 2017 Financial Analyst Day, AMD CEO Lisa Su answered an enquiry from a Deutsche-bank questioner regarding the company's aggressive 7 nm plan for their roadmap, on which AMD seems to be balancing its process shrinkage outlook for the foreseeable future. AMD will be developing their next Zen architecture revisions on 7 nm, alongside a push for 7 nm on their next-generation (or is that next-next generation?) Navi architecture. This means al of AMD's products, consumer, enterprise, and graphics, will be eventually built on this node. This is particularly interesting considering AMD's position with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, with which AMD has already had many amendments to their Wafer Supply Agreement, a remain of AMD's silicon production division spin-off, the latest of which runs from 2016 to 2020.

As it is, AMD has to pay GLOBALFOUNDRIES for its wafer orders that go to other silicon producers (in this case, TSMC), in a quarterly basis since the beginning of 2017, based on the volume of certain wafers purchased from another wafer foundry. In addition, AMD has annual wafer purchase targets from 2016 through the end of 2020, fixed wafer prices for 2016, and a framework for yearly wafer pricing in this amendment, so the company is still bleeding money to GLOBALFOUNDRIES. However, AMD is making the correct decision in this instance, I'd wager, considering GLOBALFOUNDRIES' known difficulties in delivering their process nodes absent of quirks.

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.

AMD has tentatively announced the existence of an additional Ryzen line-up, Ryzen PRO, which AMD pits against Intel's i5-7500 with some interesting performance claims for professional-grade workloads.

AMD's Jim Anderson has just confirmed reports about AMD's high-performance, enthusiast-level performance CPUs with up to 16 cores and 32 threads. These Threadripper CPUs will be available this summer.

Today on their Financial Analyst Day 2017, AMD has taken the lid off their "Naples" Zen implementation. The balanced Zen core in its unrestrained, server-grade level has become EPYC, with AMD CEO Lisa Su holding the silicon in her bare hands. The new EPYC platform with its I/O performance improvements allows more GPUs to be connected to a CPU than any other platform, with up to 128 PCIe lanes being expected on these server-grade chips.

AMD today announced availability of the Radeon RX 560 upper-mainstream graphics card, "completing" the RX 500-series family. The company had launched the RX 500 family with the RX 550, the RX 570, and the RX 580. The RX 560 is based on the 14 nm "Polaris 11" silicon, and features 1,024 stream processors across 16 GCN compute units, 64 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB or 4 GB of memory. The card is clocked at 1175 MHz core, with 1275 MHz boost, and 7.00 GHz (GDDR5-effective) memory, working out to 96 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It starts at $99.

We expect to know a little more about AMD's Ryzen 3 processors soon, which are expected to compete against Intel's Core i3 processors while offering a full-blown, true quad-core design against Intel's dual-core + HyperThreading solutions. However, it would seem that ASUS itself has given up a little of the game away, through a processor compatibility list for its upcoming Crosshair VI Hero WIFI AC motherboard.

The processor specifically detailed is AMD's Ryzen 3 1200 CPU. We already know this to be a quad-core part (and ASUS notes it as a 4C processor, so, four cores), but ASUS' misstep tells us this one will carry a base clock speed of 3.1GHz, with 8 MB of L3 cache and a 65 W TDP.

AMD Ryzen 9 "Threadripper" series 12-core, 14-core, and 16-core client desktop processors, which will form the company's next-generation high-end desktop (HEDT) lineup, which goes against Intel Core i9 "Skylake-X" series, could come in a brand new socket. This shouldn't come as a surprise because the chips have higher electrical requirements, besides double the I/O of socket AM4 Ryzen processors, such as a 44-lane PCIe gen 3.0 root complex, quad-channel DDR4 memory interface, and more. This socket, according to a "HotHardware" report, is an LGA (land-grid array) with 4,094 pins.

The new LGA-4094 socket, so-called SP3r2, will be slightly scaled up from the SP3 socket AMD has been selling enterprise Opteron-brand multi-socket CPUs on (pictured below). The consumer version of this socket could feature a more user-friendly retention mechanism that shouldn't require a screwdriver to fasten. Motherboards based on this distinctively rectangular socket will feature up to eight DDR4 DIMM slots to hold quad-channel DDR4 memory, and over four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, with support for 3-way and 4-way multi-GPU solutions. The motherboards will also feature copious amounts of onboard devices, M.2 slots, and other storage connectivity. Since "Threadripper" is rumored to be a multi-chip module of two 14 nm "Summit Ridge" dies linked together on-package with with an Infinity Fabric interconnect, only one of the two dies links to the motherboard chipset (AMD X399 chipset), while all the PCIe lanes of the second die (including those which would make up the chipset bus) are freed up.

We've recently covered how AMD was going to have a full day today, with the company's top executives present on a meeting that is expected to build on AMD's product portfolio inflection point. This meeting will bring together most of AMD's higher-ups - namely, CEO Lisa Su, head of Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri, and AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster. The purpose of this meeting seems to be to discuss AMD's inflexion point, and lay out a vision for the company's future, supported on its upcoming products: the too-long-awaited Vega, its successor Navi, and the natural evolution of the company's current Zen processors, tentatively identified as Zen+.

Don't expect this to be a full-blown, specification-laden, performance-benchmarks-driven presentation, though. That honor is probably reserved to AMD's Computex 2017 event, scheduled for May 31st from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m.

In this issue of the Ryzen BIOS update digest, we have last week's latest updates. Our BIOS update digest lets you keep track of crucial BIOS updates that improve stability of your AMD Ryzen machine. There have been a lot of updates this week corresponding with manufacturers still catching up with the AGESA 1.0.0.6 update. As per usual, only updated BIOSes from the last digest are listed. Changes are listed after each BIOS, sans beta BIOSes which do not always include change logs. You can find it all below.

Today is an eventful day in the tech world, with two high-impact leaks already offering themselves up to our scrutiny. We had previously covered AMD's upcoming HEDT platform, based on the company's new X399 chipset, as having a quite distinctive lineup of processors, with not only 16 and 12-core offerings hot on foundries presses', but also some 14-core, 28-thread chips as well. Now, a leak has apparently revealed the entire Ryzen HEDT platform, whose processor marketing name, Ryzen 9, sounds really close to Intel's Core i9.

AMD's offerings look to offer an edge at least on core-count, with the Red team's top offerings, the Ryzen 9 1998X and Ryzen 9 1998, bringing in a game-changer 16 cores and 32 threads to the table. Perhaps even more importantly, we have to mention that the 1998X (these names, if true, are quite a mouthful, though) achieves a 3.5 GHz base, 3.9 GHz boost clock, which owes nothing to AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X consumer flagship CPUs. Rumors of AMD's frequency demise on higher core-count Ryzen CPUs have been greatly exaggerated, it would seem. And did I mention that these chips are coming with a TDP of 155 W - 5 W lower than Intel's purported 12-core, i9-7920X offering? Consider that for a moment.

An AMD RX Vega video card has apparently made its way towards CompuBench. Granted, the no-name AMD graphics card could be an Instinct accelerator instead of AMD's consumer-oriented RX Vega graphics cards. However, the card did appear on CompuBench under the 6864:00 device ID, which had already appeared under a Vega Linux patch issued by the company. granted, this doesn't necessarily make it a consumer graphics product, so we'll have to look into this with some reservations.

Reports are doing the rounds regarding alleged AMD insiders having "blown the whistle", so to speak, on the company's upcoming Vega graphics cards. This leak also points towards retail availability of Vega cards on the 5th of June, which lines up nicely with AMD's May 31st Computex press conference. An announcement there, followed by market availability on the beginning of next week does sound like something that would happen in a new product launch.

On to the meat and bones of this story, three different SKUs have been leaked, of which no details are currently known, apart from their naming and pricing. AMD's Vega line-up starts off with the RX Vega Core graphics card, which is reportedly going to retail for $399. This graphics card is going to sell at a higher price than NVIDIA's GTX 1070, which should mean higher performance. Higher pricing with competitive performance really wouldn't stir any pot of excitement, so, higher performance is the most logical guess. The $399 pricing sits nicely in regards to AMD's RX 580, though it does mean there is space for another SKU to be thrown into the mix at a later date, perhaps at $329, though I'm just speculating on AMD's apparent pricing gap at this point.

BIOSTAR introduced its first custom-design Radeon RX 580 graphics card, the RX 580 8 GB Dual Cooling (model: VA5805RV82). The company had announced its foray into AMD Radeon graphics cards with a reference-design RX 580, in April. The new RX 580 Dual Cooling combines an AMD-reference design PCB with a custom-design cooling solution. This cooler features an aluminium heatsink with a copper core over the GPU; ventilated by a pair of 80 mm fans, which stay off when the GPU is idling.

The card sticks to AMD reference clock speeds of 1257 MHz core, 1340 MHz boost, and 8.00 GHz (GDDR5-effective) memory. It features 8 GB of memory over a 256-bit wide memory interface. Based on the 14 nm "Lexa" (Polaris 20) silicon, the Radeon RX 580 features 2,304 stream processors, 144 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. Display outputs include three DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.0, and a dual-link DVI. The company didn't reveal pricing.

AMD today has confirmed a highly-awaited, long-time-coming, almost too-late-to-be-true press conference on Computex 2017. Via email, the company announced their intention to share a save-the-date announcement for AMD's press conference, scheduled for May 31st from 10 a.m. - 11 a.m.

The conference will be hosted by AMD's CEO Lisa Su and other key executives, and will serve as a venue to "hear more about the latest products and leading-edge technologies coming from AMD in 2017." AMD is apparently "looking forward to providing new details on 2017 products and the ecosystems, both OEM and channel, that will support them." So yeah, this is probably it. A shame about that May 25th Easter Egg with Vega's location on the star charts, but maybe we shouldn't really be complaining, or else AMD might cancel this announcement altogether. And we've waited for Vega long enough, haven't we?

Linux patches have already given us a "lot" of information (using "lot" generously there) on AMD's upcoming Vega graphics cards. I'd wager few enthusiasts would be looking towards a dual-GPU solution anymore - not with the mostly absent support from most recent games, of which Prey is a notable exception. Not unless there was some sort of hardware feature that exposed both dies as a single GPU for games and software to handle, but I'm entering the realm of joyous, hopeful thinking here.

Back to the facts, a May 10th Linux patch has added two more device ID's to a Vega family of products: 0x6864 and 0x6868. These additions bring the total number of Vega device ID's to a healthy 9, which is still less than Polaris' 12. This is in-line with the expected number of SKUs for Vega, which should be less than those available for Polaris.

NVIDIA has been posting tremendous financial results, beating analysts' expectations on an almost quarterly basis. This stems from NVIDIA's privileged position in the graphics and computing market, with their GeForce series of consumer graphics cards having reigned almost virtually unchallenged by AMD's offerings. This happens even more distinctively on the high end of the market, where NVIDIA's halo products systematically wow consumers on a pure performance basis, and improve the company's image and market awareness absent of any competition from AMD. At the same time, the company's strong position on the AI, Deep Learning, and general computing markets ensure a strong footing should something go awry in a single market.

All of this seems to have grounded NVIDIA CEO's Jensen Huang confident posture on the company's outlook for 2017. At yesterday's earnings call, Jensen Huang was questioned whether NVIDIA's competitor's "new platform" elicited some thoughts on NVIDIA's competitiveness outlook in the second half of 2017. To this, Jensen Huang replied, in no uncertain terms, that "the competitive position is not going to change." Now naturally, a company CEO wouldn't be saying on his own company's earnings call something along the lines of "AMD's Vega platform is going to totally invert the competitive landscape and we at NVIDIA are scrambling and screaming internally at the disaster." Still, NVIDIA is probably the company that knows more about AMD's second-half 2017 efforts in the graphics space in 2017 other than AMD themselves, so this answer could also include some of Jensen's thoughts regarding that - and Volta. What do you think? Bullish posturing, or deserved confidence?

Fresh from the rumor-mill comes a report that low HBM2 availability may cripple the Vega launch that is expected to happen in the next few weeks, if a report from TweakTown is to be believed. As far as sources, there isn't much other than TweakTown's news report and their article claiming they had been told this by an "exclusive industry source." Apply your usual grain of salt here vigilant reader, but its certainly interesting speculation, if nothing else. It may turn out to be FUD, or it may turn out to be truth. Only the coming weeks will reveal the truth.

Another day, another set of Vega results see the light of it. It would seem like this saga has been going on for ages, ever since we've seen AMD showcase its prototype Vega cards running Star Wars Battlefront (4K, Ultra settings at over 60 FPS) and Doom (4K, Vulcan render path at over 60 FPS on pre-production hardware). But with the lack of official information coming from AMD (let's hope this changes on May 16th), it would seem the company is content to see us hardware news sites jumping at every detail and offering free publicity.

This is known to be Vega because the device ID, 687F:C1, was spotted on AMD's own hands while running that Doom demo in 4K. The device clocks seem to be in line with previous leaks: a 1200 MHz core clock and 8GB of video memory running at 700 MHz memory clocks. With these clocks (which are expected to be extremely conservative when we take into account what we know of Vega), the Vega video card manages to deliver a 17,801 points graphics score, approximately 1,400 points more than your average Fury X, but some hundreds less than your average, current-generation GTX 1070. Remember: AMD's MI25 is expected to come in at 1,500 MHz core clocks, and this is a professional, passively-cooled graphics card. This means that unless AMD greatly overestimated the clock capability of its Vega cards, the consumer version of Vega will have necessarily higher clocks. But we'll stay here, waiting for some more details to pour our way, as always.

Reports are circling around the web regarding an AMD meeting featuring some of its higher ups - namely, CEO Lisa Su, head of Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri, and AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster happening on the 16th of May. The purpose of this meeting seems to be to discuss AMD's inflexion point, and lay out a vision for the company's future, supported on its upcoming products: the too-long-awaited Vega, its successor Navi, and the natural evolution of the company's current Zen processors, tentatively identified as Zen+.

Naturally, a company such as AMD has its roadmap planned well in advance, with work on next-generation products and technologies sometimes even running in parallel with current-generation product development. It's just a result of the kind of care, consideration, time and money that goes into making new architectures that makes this so. And while some would say Vega is now approaching a state akin to grapes that have been hanging for far too long, AMD's next graphics architecture, Navi, and its iterations on Zen cores, which the company expect to see refreshes in a 3-to-5-year period, are other matters entirely. Maybe we'll have some more details regarding the specific time of Vega's launch (for now expected on Computex), as well as on when AMD is looking to release a Zen+ refresh. I wouldn't expect much with regards to Navi - perhaps just an outline on how work is currently underway with some comments on the expectations surrounding Global Foundries' 7 nm process, on which Navi is expected to be built. And no, folks, this isn't a Vega launch. Not yet.

AMD is giving final touches to the latest update of AGESA micro-code of its Ryzen processors, which will improve DDR4 memory support, enabling higher memory clocks and tighter timings. The new AGESA 1.0.0.6 micro-code will be deployed through motherboard vendors as motherboard BIOS updates. It will add over 20 new registers for the "Summit Ridge" integrated memory controllers, to improve compatibility with "Intel-friendly" DDR4 memory brands.

Until now, AMD recommended PC builders to opt for only certain brands of DDR4 memory for best performance. These included memory modules with Samsung "B die" DRAM chips, such as the G.Skill Flare X series. The new AGESA update will let AMD Ryzen processor users to manually dial up DRAM clocks and tighten timings of a broader range of DDR4 memory kits, more reliably, and hopefully iron out a lot of stability issues associated with memory overclocking.

Not to let itself be outshined by arch-rival NVIDIA, AMD today released a new driver suite that introduces support for the impending release of Arkane Studios' Prey. A totally new IP in an era of sequels and re-releases, which has been paired - even if only so slightly - with AMD's own Vega teaser campaign, Prey promises to offer a mix of Bioshock and System Shock, with Arkane's own peculiar blend of game mechanics and art direction. Go on ahead fighting the invasion - I'll be joining you shortly.

These drivers promise an up to 4.7% performance improvement measured on Radeon RX 580 8GB graphics when compared to Radeon Software Crimson ReLive edition 17.4.4, as well as multi GPU profile support. As always, you can grab these right here on your favorite hardware site on the universe. Just follow the link below, and catch some more details like fixed and current issues after the break.Download: AMD Radeon Crimson Relive 17.5.1 Beta Drivers

AMD could be working on at least three SKUs based on its upcoming "Vega 10" silicon to make up its Radeon RX Vega series. Leaked 3DMark validations point to a device ID that's third in a series of possible device IDs of graphics cards based on the "Vega 10" silicon, the 687F:C1, 687F:C2, and 687F:C3. All three SKUs feature 8 GB of HBM2 memory, and according to leaked 3DMark TimeSpy scores, the "slowest" SKU is faster than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070. The fastest SKU is in the same league as the GTX 1080 Ti.

The three SKUs could differ with core-configuration and clock speeds. AMD carved four SKUs out of its "Fiji" silicon, the liquid-cooled R9 Fury X, the air-cooled R9 Fury (with 12.5% fewer shaders), the SFF-friendly R9 Nano (full core-config, but aggressive power-management), and the halo dual-GPU Radeon Pro Duo (1st gen). AMD could take a similar approach with "Vega 10." AMD is expected to launch its Radeon RX Vega series within Q2-2017.

A Linux patch for AMD's GPU drivers reveals that its upcoming "Vega 10" graphics processor bears numeric core-configuration similarities to the "Fiji" silicon which drives the enthusiast-segment Radeon R9 Fury series graphics cards. The patch bears configuration values which tell the software how to utilize the resources on the GPU, by spelling them out. The entry "gfx.config.max_shader_engines = 4," for example, indicates that "Vega 10" features four shader engines, like "Fiji." Another entry "Adev-> gfx.config.max_cu_per_sh = 16" signifies the number of GCN compute units (CUs) per shader engine. Assuming the number of stream processors per CU hasn't changed from 64 in the "Vega" architecture, we're looking at a total stream processor count of 4,096. This could also put the TMU count at 256.

At earlier reveals of the "Vega 10" package, you notice a large, somewhat square GPU die neighboring two smaller rectangular memory stack dies, which together sit on a shiny structure, which is the silicon interposer. The presence of just two memory stack dies sparked speculation that "Vega 10" features a narrower 2048-bit memory interface compared to the 4096-bit of "Fiji," but since the memory itself is newer-generation HBM2, which ticks at higher clocks, AMD could run them at double the memory clock as "Fiji" to arrive at the same 512 GB/s bandwidth. The 4,096 stream processors of "Vega 10" are two generations ahead of the ones on "Fiji," which together with 14 nm process-level improvements, could run at much higher GPU clocks, making AMD get back into the high-end graphics segment.