Our sources have told us that AMD will be launching their high-end Vega GPUs for consumers in May. The launch will feature gaming products that will be coupled with the next-generation GPU architecture and HBM2 memory.

AMD's Vega GPU For Radeon Graphics Cards Arriving in May

AMD Vega GPUs are designed for a wide range of applications such as gaming, professional work and server oriented tasks. Vega has been demonstrated and detailed at various events with the most recent one being CES. AMD showcased Vega running inside their Ryzen based desktop PCs. The consumer Radeon card based on Vega was pictured last week in a video published by LinusTechTips. It gave us a pretty good look at the demo build AMD was using at the event, more on that here.

The launch of Vega based Radeon graphics cards will come a year after NVIDIA launched their GeForce 10 series graphics cards based on the Pascal GPU. The first GeForce 10 series card, the GeForce GTX 1080 was launched on 27th May. The launch will take place at a special event since AMD is planning to launch their Ryzen processors at GDC. Depending on the actual date, the launch may be close to Computex which starts on 30th May so that could be possible.

AMD will have Vega GPU based cards available in several SKUs for enthusiasts. They have at least two chips in the lineup, the Vega 10 which is the high-end part and pictured already. There's also the Vega 11 GPU which is the low-end part and expected to launch at the same time. AMD may also show their dual-chip Vega 10x2 based card at the event although it won't likely be available till a later date. AMD previously showed the Radeon Pro Duo board several months before it's launch at E3 2015. The card didn't launch until March 2016.

What To Expect From AMD Radeon Vega Graphics Cards?

AMD’s high-end Vega 10 GPU will be available to consumers in the first half of 2017. The chip spans a die size of over 500mm2 from early calculations and features two HBM2 stacks, incorporating up to 16 GB of HBM2. The consumer variant which was demonstrated using DOOM and Star Wars: Battlefront featured 8 GB of HBM2 VRAM. The specific device ID for the consumer variant is687F:C1.

The graphics chip will be utilizing the latest 14nm GFX9 core architecture which is based on the NCU (Next Compute Engine) design. The graphics card will feature 64 Compute Units or 4096 stream processors. AMD plans on increasing the throughput of the chip through increased clock speeds. This will allow AMD to pump numbers better than the Fiji GPU which is based on 28nm GCN 3.0 architecture and comes with the same number of cores, e.g. 4096 SPs.

The server part with the full chip is expected to feature a TDP of 225W with clock speeds around 1526 MHz. A consumer oriented graphics card can feature even higher clock speeds since server parts generally lack the cooling capabilities of consumer level cards which ship with better coolers and PCBs designed to allow overclocking of the GPUs. You can read our Vega GPU architecture preview over here.

AMD Vega Lineup