The Capsaicin and Cream 2017 event has just concluded and AMD has revealed a few details about the Vega GPUs. AMD gave the first details about Vega architecture during the CES 2017 and it instantly became the talk of the town. While we still don’t know much about Vega, we want to provide you with every detail that we have as of now.
Features and Specifications of Vega
AMD remained mum when it comes to the exact specifications of Vega GPUs and no details regarding clock speeds or memory were spilt out. One of the few things we know is that with Vega, AMD will be ditching the GDDR5 memory in favour of HBM2 or high-bandwidth memory. A few leaks have confirmed to come with 8GB of HBM2 memory and a memory bandwidth of 512GB/s.
Also, the Vega 10 powered MI25 accelerator is rated at a staggering 12.5 TERAFLOPS of single precision floating-point compute and double that in half precision FP16 compute. That’s 1.5 TERAFLOPS more than Nvidia’s Tesla P100 accelerator and 2.5 TERAFLOPS more than the GTX 1080.
At the Ryzen launch event, AMD not showcased the new processor series but also demoed the Vega GPU running along with the Ryzen 7 1800X processor. The duo was able to deliver a steady frame rate of 60 fps at 4K resolution while running Star Wars Battlefront: Rogue. It is a great feat as the system must me running an unoptimized driver for the GPU. As many as 80 percent of AMD’s engineers are working on optimising the drivers to bring out even better performance from the upcoming line of GPUs.
Possible Release Date and Cost
Now at least AMD Vega has got its retail name and will be called Radeon RX Vega once launched. We have been hearing the launch to happen sometime in the second quarter of 2017 and it seems like AMD is going to wait for the last moment to launch the GPUs. With the launch of RX 500 series being said to happen on April 4, AMD might announce the Vega series at Computex between May 30 and June 3rd, reported Wccftech.
There is absolutely no information about what these Vega GPUs will be priced at. The current offering from AMD, the Radeon RX 480 starts at $169 and the Radeon R9 Fury X is priced at $389. Considering these, AMD should stick to a modest pricing for the Vega series. Taking into account the recently launched GTX 1080 Ti at $699, AMD will have to price its Vega and RX 500 series accordingly to make a comeback and stay relevant in the market for long.
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