AMD’s Compute-Heavy Vega 10 GPU With 16 GB HBM2 To Be Announced in Late 2016 – Coming To Professional Platforms First

AMD's Vega lineup will feature immensely powerful cards with HBM2 memory in 2017. Original Image by FallenZeraphine

AMD is expected to announce their next generation Vega 10 GPU this year. While consumer launch comes later, the GPU will be announced for the professional market first by the end of this year. Vega 10 will be AMD’s high-performance core that will bring HBM2 and massive compute performance to users.

AMD Vega 10 GPU Announcement Expected Later This Year – Features HBM2

The rumor comes straight from Fudzilla whose sources suggests that AMD is going to make a announcement regarding Vega 10 in late 2016. This might be true as AMD also announced their Polaris architecture at the end of 2015. However, AMD has officially confirmed that Vega will be launching for the enthusiast market in 1H of 2017. But the GPUs being referred to here are aimed at the professional market.

Vega 10 will be aimed at server and professional market simultaneously. The Vega series itself will have several variants which were detailed in a leaked roadmap. A possible avenue for the announcement could be the upcoming Supercomputer Show in November 2016 but AMD could arrange their own event somewhere else.

According to Fud, the top-end Vega 10 GPU will feature 16 GB of HBM2. There will also be a cut down variant with less amount of HBM2. The reason mentioned for making the announcement much earlier is similar to NVIDIA’s Tesla P100. Showcasing products earlier and having a limited launch makes users excited for upcoming products. It will also make AMD ready for volume availability of such GPUs in early 2017.

AMD Vega 10, Vega 11, Vega 10 x2 and Vega 20 In 2017 and 2018

In 2017, AMD finally plans to upgrade all of their GPUs to the new FinFET architecture. While Polaris serves the mainstream, Vega will be aiming for the high-end market. The new graphics chip for Deep Learning will be the Vega 10, a very beefy GPU which we detailed yesterday. AMD Vega 10 is expected to launch in first quarter of 2017.

From the leaked details, we now know that Vega 10 can feature up to 4096 stream processors based on a new GCN uARCH (GFX9). The chip has as much as 24 TFLOPs of half-precision and 12 TFLOPs of single precision compute performance. The chip also features up to 16 GB of HBM2 that is clocked to operate at 512 GB/s. The cards based on this chip are rated with 225W TDP.

AMD Vega 20 Will Be Their First FinFET Based HPC Chip – Launching in 2H 2018

This shows that Hawaii will still stand as the HPC muscle up till 2018. A new GPU will be developed by AMD in the meanwhile known as Vega 20 with DP rated at 1/2 of SP. This would be a solution targeted at GP100 or the new GV100 chip based on Volta which is expected to be introduced by then.

The latter is more possible since Vega 20 would not only use a enhanced built design but also come packaged in the new GloFo 7nm FF process. Global Foundries has already announced risk production of 7nm FF in 2018 so we might just get to see Vega 20 in some form in that year. With up to 32 GB of HBM2 memory (1 TB/s) and a fast 64 compute unit design, this chip will have impressive double precision capabilities for HPC platforms.

Also, do you remember that we mentioned a high-performance interconnect being developed by AMD a while ago? Looks like the solution will be known as xGMI. This peer-to-peer solution will be embedded in HPC servers that include Vega 20 and Zen based Naples processors.

AMD Server GPU Roadmap 2016-2019