During the Computex keynote, AMD revealed the first 7 nm Vega gpu. The gpu sample was powering a Radeon Instinct accelerator card with 32 GB of high bandwidth memory (hbm2). These cards are mainly used for scientific calculations, machine learning and high-end media creation, thus the enormous capacity.
7 nm Vega = Vega 20?
In April, some benchmarks surfaced which were attributed to a gpu dubbed ‘Vega 20’ on the AMD roadmap. One can expect that those benchmarks were run on an early sample of the 7 nm Vega shown today.
Pro users
On stage a scene was rendered in Maxxon’s Cinema 4D. AMD’s RadeonPro renderer was used to offload all ray-tracing calculations to the GPU. By switching to 7 nm Vega, AMD shrunk the die twofold, doubled power efficiency and improved performance by 35%.
AMD did not disclose to which card these results were compared.
The Radeon Instinct is aimed at professional users like (data) scientists and creatives using the vast processing power and memory to accelerate their workflows.
What about gaming?
No gamer oriented cards were announced during the presentation. However, as gaming expo E3 is right around the corner, AMD might keep their gunpowder dry in order to make a bigger impact in Los Angeles at the E3 conference.
It is highly probable that the gamer oriented cards will not be based on Vega, but instead use the next generation Navi architecture. The chip foundries will have time to perfect the 7 nm process and improve yield in order to be able to mass produce all those gamer cards.
