AMD has finally confirmed the die size of its new flagship graphics chip powering its Vega based graphics products. The first of the new Vega lineup, the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition and Radeon instinct MI25 launched late last month. The rest of the Vega family, namely the gaming oriented RX Vega graphics products and professional Radeon Pro Vega parts are set to release later this month at SIGGRAPH.

AMD's Vega 10 GPU - 484mm² Of Magic Sand

Vega 10 is generally believed to be one of two Vega graphics chips that AMD has developed based on the Vega architecture. The second being Vega 11, in addition to the fact that very little is known about this chip AMD has yet to even officially acknowledge its existence. We've only seen it mentioned in an official capacity once, by Anandtech's Ryan Smithback in March of last year.

With that being said, Vega 10 is going to be our primary focus in this piece. We finally have official confirmation regarding the actual die area of this chip and it comes directly from the man himself, Raja Koduri.

Yes..I did say that..the number is the closest perfect square actually:)

— Raja Koduri (@GFXChipTweeter) July 2, 2017

Vega 10 measures 484mm², 252mm² larger than AMD's previously largest 14nm based graphics chip, Polaris 10, which powers the company's Radeon RX 540 and 470 graphics cards. This makes it by far the largest chip the company has designed on 14nm FinFET.

AMD Confirms July Launch At SIGGRAPH For RX Vega Gaming Optimized Graphics Cards

Some rumors have been floating around over the past couple of days that AMD may be delaying its RX Vega launch. The company dispelled these rumors earlier today, confirming that RX Vega will in fact debut at SIGGRAPH later this month as previously announced.

We can't wait to announce our new Vega products, including RX at this year's #SIGGRAPH - make sure to follow us for more details. pic.twitter.com/LENxuPfj7n

— Radeon RX (@Radeon) July 1, 2017

AMD's Jason Evangelho also went on record to state that gamers should not draw conclusions about Vega's gaming performance based on Vega Frontier Edition benchmarks. Vega Frontier Edition was designed and optimized for a vastly different set of tasks and use cases aimed at the professional market. On the other hand RX Vega graphics cards coming at the end of the month are specifically designed and optimized for games.

I think it’s premature to worry about a product’s gaming performance by judging a different product NOT optimized for gaming.

— Jason Evangelho (@killyourfm) June 30, 2017

We've also seen similar comments from an MSI representative, the very same one that hinted at Vega's power requirements a week earlier.

"please dont compare this card too much with RX Vega" via Tweakers.com

These comments echo Raja Koduri's previous statements about RX Vega graphics cards having significantly better optimized drivers for games and "some flavors" of RX Vega actually outperforming Vega FE.

Raja Koduri - Chief Architect Radeon Technologies Group - Reddit AMA

RX will be fully optimized gaming drivers, as well as a few other goodies that I can't tell you about just yet....But you will like FE too, if you can't wait:)

Raja Koduri - Chief Architect Radeon Technologies Group- Reddit AMA

Consumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version!

Q : 6) Many argue that vega is just a refined polaris gpu, how would you respond to this ?

Raja Koduri - Chief Architect Radeon Technologies Group- Reddit AMA

A: My software team wishes this was true:)

Vega is both a new GPU architecture and also completely new SOC architecture. It's our first Infinity Fabric GPU as well

It appears that Vega, being a new architecture, poses significant challenges for AMD's driver team. There's very little doubt that AMD's driver team is still optimizing for Vega and hasn't rolled out specific game by game optimizations in the drivers just yet. AMD will likely not be doing so until closer to RX Vega's official release.To what extent this will affect Vega's current gaming performance? We'll have to wait until those drivers are out and we have RX Vega in the labs to say for certain. Don't expect any miracles though.

What's Inside The Magic Sand?

Vega 10 Block Diagram

Vega 10 features 256 texture mapping units and 64 next generation Vega compute units arranged in two islets,each housing two compute engines. Every compute engine includes twodistinct compute clusters. Each of those clusters features 512 stream processors and 32 texture mapping units. The chip in its entirety hasa total of 4096 stream processors and 256 texture mapping units.

On the front-end side of things there are 64 render output units that make up16 distinct render back-ends that connect to the 2048-bit HBM2 memory interface. The whole Vega 10 die sits on an interposer and is 2.5D stacked with two HBM2 stacks. Everystack can be configured with up to 8 GB of memory for a total of 16 gigabytes as can be found in the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition.

For a more detailed look at the Vega 10 GPU specs make sure to check out our in-depth Vega 10 spec break down here.

AMD Vega 10 GPU Specifications

AMD Radeon Vega Lineup: