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AMD Radeon RX Vega will appear at Computex—but launch comes later

RX Vega gaming GPU will "be faster than Frontier version," launch later in the year.

AMD Radeon RX Vega will appear at Computex—but launch comes later

AMD promised more details on its 14nm FinFET Vega architecture—which debuted earlier this week in the form of the compute-focused Radeon Vega Frontier Edition—at Computex in May. But those hopeful for a snappy release following the reveal are out of luck. Radeon RX Vega, a consumer version of Vega, will be shown off at Computex, but won't be available to buy until later in the year. Radeon Vega FE, the workstation/cloud-oriented part, is currently earmarked for a "late June" launch.

News on the availability of RX Vega comes from Radeon VP Raja Koduri, who took to Reddit yesterday in an AMA.

"We'll be showing Radeon RX Vega off at Computex, but it won't be on store shelves that week," said Koduri. "Some of Vega's features, like our High Bandwidth Cache Controller, HBM2, Rapid-Packed Math, or the new geometry pipeline, have the potential to really break new ground and fundamentally improve game development. These aren't things that can be mastered overnight... We believe those experiences are worth waiting for and shouldn't be rushed out the door."

Koduri also took the opportunity to have a wee dig at Nvidia, which has thus far only implemented HBM2 memory in extremely expensive enterprise graphics cards like the recently announced Tesla V100. Vega FE "employs two stacks of HBM2," according to Koduri, offering speeds of up to 480GB/s. Weirdly, that's less than the 512GB/s of the Fury X and the 547.7GB/s of Nvidia's Titan Xp, although it's hardly slow.

"We're effectively putting a technology that's been limited to super expensive, out-of-reach GPUs into a consumer product," said Koduri. "Right now only insanely priced graphics cards from our competitors that aren’t within reach of any gamer or consumer make use of it... The good news is that unlike HBM1, HBM2 is offered from multiple memory vendors—including Samsung and Hynix—and production is ramping to meet the level of demand that we believe Radeon Vega products will see in the market."

Elsewhere in the AMA, Koduri confirmed a few other Vega titbits, including that it is possible to run Vega FE with 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors, rather than the two 8-pin connectors that made it onto production boards for "extra headroom." It is possible the RX version of Vega opts for more thrifty use of power. Vega FE will also support the consumer-focused RX driver for those with deep pockets that use a Vega FE for gaming, while the liquid cooled version of the card will feature "a slight difference in clock speed." That said, RX Vega will ultimately be faster for gamers.

"Consumer RX will be much better optimised for all the top gaming titles, and flavours of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version!"

Finally, Koduri noted that multi-GPU designs, similar to the recently revealed Ryzen Epyc CPU—a 32C/64T server chip that features four eight-core CPUs—are "possible with Infinity Fabric."

"Infinity Fabric allows us to join different engines together on a die much easier than before," said Koduri. "As well it enables some really low-latency and high-bandwidth interconnects. This is important to tie together our different IPs (and partner IPs) together efficiently and quickly. It forms the basis of all of our future ASIC designs."

ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) usually refers to a highly specialised chip that is designed to execute a certain type of workload more quickly than a general-purpose chip (such as a CPU or GPU). In this case, Koduri seems to be referring to the chip packaging that connects together multiple discrete components on a single circuit board.

Channel Ars Technica