AMD launches the first 7nm GPUs, but they're not for you
You'll have to wait a while longer for gaming cards.
AMD is following through on its promise of releasing 7-nanometer GPUs -- not that you can use one yet. The company has formally launched Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 cards that use the denser, more efficient chip technology to accelerate specialized computing tasks like AI, cloud services and scientific calculations. The MI60 in particular is billed as the fastest double-precision accelerator of its type, pumping out 7.4 teraflops when crunching 64-bit floating point data. Both boards pack very high-bandwidth (up to 1TB/s) HBM2 memory and can work together in "hive rings" of up to four GPUs thanks to 200GB/s peer-to-peer links.
The MI60 will make the promise of 7nm GPUs a reality by shipping to data centers before the end of 2018, while its more accessible MI50 counterpart should arrive no later than the first quarter of 2019.
This isn't the 7nm gaming card many people are clamoring for, but it's still a milestone for the computing industry -- you can finally find 7nm tech in a GPU outside of a mobile chip. NVIDIA's RTX graphics hardware remains built on a 12nm process. Look at this as AMD laying the groundwork for 2019, when 7nm could is more likely to find its way inside your gaming rig.
