HiGame

There’s a new set of rumors cropping up about AMD’s Vega. Last month, we covered an AMD press slide that stated the GPU would only arrive sometime in the first half of 2017. Now, reports indicate that the chip could drop in the first quarter — still quite late compared with Nvidia’s Pascal, which will have been in market for nearly a year at that point, but better than the late June timeframe typically hit by “H1” launch windows.

The upcoming Vega 10 chip will feature 24 TFLOPS of 16-bit precision performance, 16GB of HBM2, and 512GB/s of memory bandwidth, with 64 compute units in total, according to VideoCardz. If Vega keeps GCN’s 64 compute cores per compute unit, that puts a full-size Vega core at 4,096 cores in total. The 16GB of HBM2 is expected based on the specs we’ve seen for that standard, but the RAM bandwidth is significantly lower than what we’ve expected to date. HBM2 is designed to support up to 256GB/s of bandwidth per stack, and first-generation HBM2 solutions are expected to ship with 4GB stacks. That works out to up to 1TB/s of memory bandwidth for a full implementation — and the first-generation HBM implementations that AMD shipped were full implementations.



If these stats are accurate, it implies that AMD has kept bandwidth flat between Fiji and Vega rather than improving it further by pushing HBM2. Nvidia’s GP100, which is set to debut in 2017, offers 720GB/s of memory bandwidth. 512GB/s of bandwidth would compete well against Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and Titan X, however, and AMD may have scaled its bandwidth accordingly. TDP on the new high-end card is supposedly 225W, which would put it near Nvidia’s Titan X.

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