AMD's long awaited competitor to Nvidia's GTX 1080 may be right around as the company teases the launch venue for its upcoming Vega GPU. The teaser came straight from theSeniorDirector, Global Marketing and Public Relations, Radeon Technologies Group at AMD Chris Hook. Who posted a picture of the launch venue for Vega on his facebook page.

Vega is the code name of AMD's next generation high performance graphics architecture featuring 14nm FinFET technology and second generation stacked High Bandwidth Memory. In many ways Vega is the successor to AMD's last flagship graphics chip Fiji. The world's very first GPU to feature high bandwidth memory and the heart and soul that powers AMD's Fury X, Fury & Nano graphics cards.

AMD Teases Vega GPU Launch, GTX 1080 Radeon Competitor May Be Coming Sooner Than Expected

The VEGA teaser is a teaser in every sense of the word. Chris Hook did not reveal too much but just enough to hook us in, pun definitely intended. The photo he posted on his facebook page shows what looks like a large industrial space that's in desperate need of "renovations" as Chris put it.

Senior Director, Global Marketing and Public Relations - Chris Hook

Unless Hook is attempting some kind of elaborate prank here, thiswillbe where the venue will eventually be held once the place is set up and ready to go. So it's quite clear that while VEGA may very well be coming sooner than we had expected it's still several months away at the very least.

The VEGA GPU architecture was first announced by AMD's head of the Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri at the company's big"Capsaicin" media event held earlier this year. Out of Capsaicin came the very first long term GPU roadmap that we've seen from AMD since the introduction of the very first GCN graphics products in 2011. the company's Graphics Core Next architecture, or GCN for short, is now leveraged across the company's entire graphics portfolio. From discrete GPUs, to APUs and console semi-custom SOCs.

The just launched Polaris based RX 400 series products are based on the company's 4th generation GCN architecture. According to several filed patents and some very interesting leaks via AMD's engineering staff VEGA is based on a brand new iteration of GCN. At Capsaicin no specific launch dates were given for VEGA, not evenPolaris for that matter. Despite the fact that it was it had been scheduled to launch just a few months after the event.

VEGA In October...?

With that being said, the company's official roadmap suggested that VEGA would launch in 2017. We've heard some whispers since VEGA's official announcement back in March which suggested that AMD was aggressively attempting to push the launch ahead toOctober of 2016, rather than early 2017.

VEGA's Development Reached A Major Milestone in June

If you've been keeping taps onWCCF and hardware news you'll remember that AMD's Chief Architect of the Radeon Technologies Group Raja Koduri hadrevealed back in late June that VEGA had passeda majordevelopment milestone. In fact Koduri tweeted several photos of the celebration right after he delivered the news.

Design team is thrilled with your response. Celebrated a milestone with the team. Long way to go before you see it pic.twitter.com/duQVBBGict

— Raja Koduri (@GFXChipTweeter) June 23, 2016

Koduri did not offer much detail about what themilestone specifically was. It could have been the very first workingsilicon out of the fab, or final tapeout of the product. Whatever it was, it was clearly a huge deal.

Incredibly proud of our gpu design team here in shanghai that delivered polaris family and next Vega pic.twitter.com/ejvFJW1DoY

— Raja Koduri (@GFXChipTweeter) June 23, 2016

We broke the news on the Vega 10 code name in an exclusive back in January. This is the infamous "Greenland" reincarnatethat AMD has been working on for so many years. The VEGA architecture hadn't been announced until March, and the "Vega 10" chip hadn't been mentioned in a public setting until Raja broke the news about the major milestone a couple of months ago.Now we have Chris Hook's sneaky teaser. It definitely seems like the pace is picking up around VEGA.We'd be genuinely surprised if AMD did not at least announce one or both of its upcoming VEGA GPUs before the year's end even if no products are launched.

Vega 10 Specs

Leaked & rumored specs.

VEGA Built On14nm FinFET-Features Second Generation - HBM2 - Stacked High Bandwidth Memory

The Fiji GPU powering the R9 Fury series isAMD's largest ever graphics processing unit. It's also the world's first to feature the3D structured, 2.5D stacked High Bandwidth Memory technology. This standard was co-invented byAMD and SK Hynix, one of the world's largest memory makers. The advantages ofvertically stacking dies are many. One of which is the enablementofsignificantlygreater densities compared toGDDR5. HBM cubes also occupy a lot less space than GDDR5, allowing engineers toachieve tremendousarea savings on the printed circuit board of thegraphics card. This is what enabled AMD to make the popular R9 Nano, atinysix inch graphics cards with 8 TFLOPSof compute. A figure that greatlyovershadows similarly sized cards.

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There other advantages toHBM, namely how it's packaged. Because the memory chips sit next tothe GPU on an interposer, a very short distance away from the GPU die, it allows engineers to create immenselywider memorybusses with reduced latency and very low power requirements. The end result translates to a memory standard that's fast, scalable, very power efficient andvery area efficient.

VEGA IsAll About Bringing HBM To The Masses

The Radeon Technologies Group'splan is to introduce HBM2 technology with the upcoming VEGA graphics architectureacross more market segments compared to where the technology currently exists. Which is confined only to the highest end segment of the market. If everything goes according to plan VEGA willbe the first architecture tobring HBM to all segments of the graphics market, up and down the stack.

HBM2 is the second generation of the vertically stacked High Bandwidth Memory standard that AMD introduced last year with theRadeon R9 Fury X graphics card, the R9 Fury and the R9 Nano. Second generation High Bandwidth Memory is not only faster than the first generation but it also scales to capacities 8 times larger than HBM1. HBM2 feature 1GB per die and up to 8 Hi stacks for 8GB per cube. Which is eight times more than the highest capacity currently available per cube on HBM1. Additionally, HBM2 operates at twice the speed of HBM1 for double the memory bandwidth.

This means that VEGA 10 can be configured with up to 32GB of HBM2 memory for a total of one terabyte/s of memory bandwidth.Paired with over four thousand next generation stream processors VEGA 10 will be the most potent graphics chip from AMD yet. That is until the next big thing comes out. As isthe nature of the beast.

AMD Radeon Graphics Architectures