More Vega 12 Code Appears in Open Source Drivers

Category: Video Cards
Posted: August 24, 2018 07:46AM
Author: Guest_Jim_*

AMD's decision to create and support open source drivers for its GPUs on Linux has led to some interesting reveals, as unreleased and even unannounced products will appear in the code. Some months ago a Vega 12 GPU appeared, and it is still not known what exactly it is, but now the driver code gives us a look at the hardware. From the code shown by Phoronix, it appears Vega 12 is a cut down design compared to the full size Vega 10 used in the RX Vega 56, RX Vega 64, and other discrete Vega-based cards. While Vega 10 has 16 compute units in each of the four compute engines, resulting in 64 in total this Vega 12 GPU is listed as only having five per engine, so a total of 20. That does make this a significantly cut-down chip. It is also marked as stepping 4, while Vega 10 is stepping 0, and that it supports stereo rendering.

Some are speculating this might be the discrete mobile Vega GPU AMD showed off at CES but has yet to launch. Others think this could be used to replace the Polaris-based RX 500 series, and if this is the case it will almost certainly use a different memory controller as well, to work with GDDR5 or GDDR6 instead of HBM2. For now, only AMD knows but as more work is done on this software we can expect the product to come closer to an announcement.

Source: Phoronix and Github (Commit)