Next Generation Radeon Flagship With Vega 10 Architecture Will Be Coming in 1H 2017 – AMD Confirms
The official roadmap present on file in the documents presented to investors reveals that Vega GPUs will be landing sometime in the first half of 2017.
A few weeks ago there was some rumbling on the rumor mill that the Vega lineup has actually been pushed forward to launch sometime in October this year. However, this is something that has been put to rest by AMD - which is kind of ironic, considering the rumor itself stemmed from teases by officials from AMD. The company has clarified in its roadmap revealed to investors that the Vega architecture will launch for the enthusiast market sometime in the first half of 2017.
Official roadmap confirms Vega based, 14nm FinFET flagship will not be landing this year
The first half of 2017 means that the time-frame AMD has given for the architecture lies anywhere between January 2017 to June 2017. This also means that AMD's synergy between its product portfolio stands to be maximized in the first half of 2017 considering Zen based x86 CPUs for the enthusiast market will also be shipping in volume during this time frame. Zen processors and Vega GPUs can trigger a new upgrade cycle in the enthusiast market and for followers of the red camp.
Chris Hook recently posted a teaser on his page and while he made no declaration of any exact date of launch, many of us took it to mean that the launch might be happening sooner than expected. The photo he posted on his facebook page shows what looks like a large industrial space that's in desperate need of "renovations" as Chris put it. He clarified that this was going to be the launch venue of Vega 10. It is also worth mentioning that AMD has in the past teased development milestones of Vega 10.
Before we go any further there is one thing that I would like to point out. Even though this is the roadmap as it currently stands, there is nothing stopping AMD from actually pushing forward the release date of Vega (in an attempt to surprise the press) if it really wants to and is of course in a position to do so. The Vega GPU is going to the first high end GPU on the finFET platform (from AMD) and the true successor to Fiji. According to what we know so far the process is going to be 14nm FinFET GlobalFoundries - although this can change as well in the future.
This also has interesting ramifications for when we can expect the GTX 1080 Ti from Nvidia. They have already revealed the GTX 1080 graphics card and with no AMD competitor in sight they will have more or less a free run at the highest performing single graphics card on the market. This could also means that we might not be seeing the GTX 1080 Ti any time soon (considering the Ti will eat into TITAN sales and the GPU manufacturer will have no incentive to release the card so soon).
GPU Family | AMD Polaris | AMD Vega | NVIDIA Pascal | NVIDIA Volta |
---|---|---|---|---|
Flagship GPU | Polaris 10 | Vega 10 | NVIDIA GP100 | NVIDIA GV110 |
GPU Process | GloFo 14nm FinFET | GloFo 14nm FinFET | TSMC 16nm FinFET | FinFET |
GPU Transistors | 5.7 | Up To 18 Billion | 15.3 Billion | TBA |
Memory (Consumer Cards) | GDDR5 | HBM2 | HBM2 | HBM2 |
HBM2 Bandwidth | 256 GB/s | 1 TB/s | 720 GB/s | 1 TB/s |
Graphics Architecture | GCN 4.0 (Polaris) | GCN 5.0 (Vega) | 5th Gen Pascal CUDA | 6th Gen Volta CUDA |
Predecessor | Radeon 300 Series | Radeon Fury Series | GM200 (Maxwell) | GV110 (Volta) |
Launch | 2016 | 2017 | 2016 | 2017-2018 |
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