AMD Radeon VEGA GPU Architecture Preview Coming at CES 2017 – New Teaser “After The Uprising” Released
After posting a teaser on their twitter page, AMD has finally decided to unveil that they will be showcasing the full Vega GPU architecture preview at CES 2017. The upcoming showcase confirms that Vega GPU (or GPUs) are in a ready state and should make it for launch in Q1 2017.
AMD Radeon VEGA GPU Architecture Preview at CES 2017
The "After the Uprising" teaser shows the wake of the Radeon Rebellion which started with the RX 400 series cards. AMD will marching their next-generation chips against competitors as Vega is expected to offer a punch in overall performance and efficiency. The clip is short but AMD has also launched a website cleverly titled as ve.ga.
The website contains a countdown which marks the specific time at which AMD will showcase the preview of their Radeon Vega GPU. This will be the consumer variant as it's part of the Radeon lineup. The countdown ends in 3 days so we know that the event is going to take place at CES 2017.
The announcement from AMD comes just a few days after NVIDIA announced that they will be showcasing new technologies at their CES 2017 keynote. It's highly likely that NVIDIA will announce the enthusiast grade GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card at the event which will deliver higher performance increases over the GeForce GTX 1080 which is already one of the best high-end offerings in the market.
AMD Vega GPU Specifications - Those that are Confirmed and Rumored
The AMD Vega GPU will be embedded inside a new generation of Radeon RX series cards. There isn't much room to fill inside the Radeon RX 400 series so my best guess would be a new family for Vega. It certainly makes more marketing sense since a full fledged Radeon RX 500 series lineup sounds much better. The new family will feature several cards based on the Vega GPU, rumor has it we will be looking at both HBM2 and GDDR5/X variants.
AMD Vega GPU For AI Acceleration Features 16 GB HBM2 Memory Running at 512 GB/s - The Instinct MI25 Card
Coming to the specifications, we have already seen two variants of the Vega GPU demoed by AMD. First one is the Instinct MI25 accelerator which made highlights at AMD's Tech Summit 2016. The AMD Vega 10 GPU has a peak compute performance of 12.5 TFLOPs in single precision mode. It also has twice the packed math or mixed precision compute performance that is rated at 25 TFLOPs. We can assume that this chip has a dual precision performance of 6.25 TFLOPs if it features a 2:1 ratio of single- to double-precision throughput like its competitor.
AMD packs a few additional technologies such as NCU which is being assumed to be “Next Compute Unit”. AMD also packs in a high bandwidth cache and controller. The whole card package is rated at less than 300W which is lower than the NVIDIA Tesla P100.
The specific product has a memory bandwidth of 512 GB/s on an HBM2 interface. This would mean we are either looking at a 2048-bit memory bus (2 HBM2 stacks) at 1000 MHz or a 4096-bit memory bus (4 HBM2 stacks) at 500 MHz. The capacity of the card is 16 GB and would be utilizing the second generation high-bandwidth memory interface.
AMD Vega 10 and NVIDIA Pascal GP100 GPU Specs Comparison:
| GPU Architecture | NVIDIA Pascal | AMD Vega |
|---|---|---|
| Product Market | Tesla (P100.2) | Instinct MI25 |
| GPU Process | 16nm FinFET | 14nm FinFET |
| Flagship Chip | GP100 GPU | Vega 10 GPU |
| GPU Design | SMP (Streaming Multiprocessor Pascal) | NCU (Next Compute Unit) |
| Maximum Transistors | 15.3 Billion | TBD |
| Maximum Die Size | 610mm2 | 500-540mm2 |
| Maximum Cores | 3840 CUDA Cores | 4096 Stream Processors |
| FP16 Compute | ~24.0 TFLOPs | 25.0 TFLOPs |
| FP32 Compute | ~12.0 TFLOPs | 12.5 TFLOPs |
| FP64 Compute | ~6.00 TFLOPs | 0.75 TFLOPs |
| Maximum VRAM | 16 GB HBM2 | 16 GB HBM2 (High Bandwidth Cache and Controller) |
| Maximum Bandwidth | 720 GB/s | 512 GB/s |
| Maximum TDP | 300W | |
| Launch Year | Q2 2016 | 1H 2017 |
AMD Vega GPU For Consumers Features 8 GB of HBM2 Memory Running at 512 GB/s - The Secret 687F:C1 Card
The consumer variant of the Vega GPU was demoed in Doom and put up some fiery performance against a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. The card was seen outpacing the NVIDIA solution but we don't have exact metrics at hand. Regardless, it's nice to see the Vega GPU being faster than an enthusiast solution based on NVIDIA's latest Pascal GPU architecture.
Later on, we confirmed that this was the exact GPU that showed up in the AOTS database earlier this month. This variant packs 8 GB of HBM2 and is more focused on desktop PCs rather than the HPC market. Performance of this card was on par with GeForce GTX 1080, but drivers have not been optimized for it yet so we can expect even faster performance from the final variant.
AMD 687F:C1 DirectX 11 / DX12 Tests (1080P/1440P):
There are four benchmarks that were conducted with DirectX 11 API mode. These consist of Crazy, Standard and Low settings. The only score that has actually been compared to other GPUs was the Standard 1080P DX 12 test. This shows the card scoring 8400 points which is in the range of what GeForce GTX 1080 scores. The score was listed at the 131st position before it was deleted. The fact that it was deleted could indicate that it was not supposed to be shown to the public.
The benchmarks also show the card performing next to a high-end GTX 1080. Currently, there's no GPU from AMD that comes this close in the Polaris Radeon 400 series lineup. If that's not enough, AMD also demoed the Vega GPU at the New Horizon event and showed the card running Star Wars Battlefront at 4K with greater than 60 FPS which was higher than the refresh rate of the monitor displaying the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDeeE6JF-as
AMD Vega Lineup
| Graphics Card | Radeon R9 Fury X | Radeon RX 480 | Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition | Radeon Vega Pro | Radeon RX Vega (Gaming) | Radeon RX Vega Pro Duo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | Fiji XT | Polaris 10 | Vega 10 | Vega 10 | Vega 10 | 2x Vega 10 |
| Process Node | 28nm | 14nm FinFET | FinFET | FinFET | FinFET | FinFET |
| Stream Processors | 4096 | 2304 | 4096 | 3584 | 4096 (?) | Up to 8192 |
| Performance | 8.6 TFLOPS 8.6 (FP16) TFLOPS | 5.8 TFLOPS 5.8 (FP16) TFLOPS | ~13 TFLOLPS ~25 (FP16) TFLOPS | 11 TFLOLPS 22 (FP16) TFLOPS | >13 TFLOLPS >25 (FP16) TFLOPS | TBA TBA |
| Memory | 4GB HBM | 8GB GDDR5 | 16GB HBM2 | TBA | TBA | TBA |
| Memory Bus | 4096-bit | 256-bit | 2048-bit | 2048-bit | 2048-bit | 4096-bit |
| Bandwidth | 512GB/s | 256GB/S | 480GB/S | 400GB/S | TBA | TBA |
| TDP | 275W | 150W | TBA | TBA | TBA | TBA |
| Launch | 2015 | 2016 | June 2017 | June 2017 | July 2017 | TBA |
This card really looks to be top-notch and built for enthusiasts and we can't wait to learn more about it. It's definitely time to get excited if you have been searching for a true flagship graphics card from both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon. The first few quarters of 2017 will bring true high-end GPUs for PC gamers to grab from store shelves.
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