AMD chief executive Dr. Lisa Su has confirmed that Vega is going to launch by the end of June this year. Vega is AMD’s next-generation graphics architecture and it is expected to make a huge impact on gaming, enterprise, as well as professional workstation markets.
The confirmation came via the company’s Q1 2017 earning reports released yesterday. Following the release of the report, AMD stocks plummeted by nearly 18% this morning.
The report suggests that the company had achieved a notable growth in revenue, gross margins, and market share compared to where the figures stood just a year before.
Coming back to Vega, the new architecture happens to be Radeon’s latest 14nm graphics architecture that symbolizes a big leap forward for the company ever since the launch of the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture in 2011. As you already know, GCN subsequently made inroads into mobile and desktop graphics boards, professional solution, and even into gaming consoles released by heavyweights such as Microsoft and Sony. Eventually, it reached the status of the unofficial go-to architecture for game developers from across the world.
Despite maintaining and building on basically the same GCN heritage, the fundamental building block of every new Radeon graphics processor based on Vega is brand new. This is precisely what distinguishes it from the earlier GCN architectures.
| MobiPicker | HD 7000 Series | R9 290 Series | R9 Fury Series | RX 400 Series | TBA |
| Flagship GPU | Tahiti | Hawaii | Fiji | Polaris 10 | Vega #TBA |
| GCN Iteraion | GCN 1 | GCN 2 | GCN 3 | GCN 4 | GCN NCU |
| Launch | 2011 | 2013 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 |
Each individual part of the graphics engine at the heart of Vega chips is new. Apart from a next-generation compute engine, it also comes with new pixel and geometry engines. Meanwhile, the cache, render-back-end, and memory subsystems have all witnessed considerable revamp.
Also, Vega is the second AMD graphics architecture to be coming with stacked High Bandwidth Memory instead of the standard GDDR5.
As for the exact release date, it is obviously too early to predict anything as of now. Technically it could be anytime from today till all the way to June 30. If I had to, I would bet my money on June second or third week.
In any case, things have just started getting hotter. A seemingly endless inflow of rumors and leaks awaits us in the days to come. Stay tuned to MobiPicker as we dig deeper to find more about the next much-anticipated AMD launch.