The AMD Vega GPU Architecture Teaser: Higher IPC, Tiling, & More, Coming in H1’2017
by Ryan Smith on January 5, 2017 9:00 AM ESTFirst Thoughts: A Peek At What’s To Come
Wrapping things up, while today’s reveal from AMD is only a teaser of what they have been working on over the last few years with Vega, it’s none the less an important one. Based on what we know so far, Vega stands to be the biggest change to AMD’s GPU architecture since GCN 1.0 was released 5 years ago, and the changes to the ALUs, the ROPs, the memory structure, and other aspects of Vega reinforce this notion. To be sure, Vega is not a wholly new architecture – it is clearly a further refinement of GCN – but then this is exactly why GCN was designed to be able to evolve through refinements over a very long period of time.
What we have for now then is a quick look at what’s to come from AMD. There are still many things we don’t know, not the least of which is the actual GPU configurations. But for a teaser it’s enough to show that AMD has been hard at work. It sets the stage for the hardware and marketing ramp-up to come over the next few months.
But for now, let’s close with an image. As I mentioned before, the first Vega has taped out, and Radeon Technology Group’s frontman and Chief Architect, Raja Koduri, has one. The chip was just a few weeks old as of December, and while trying to discern die size may be a little too error-prone, we can see one important detail: 2 HBM2 packages.
Raja and AMD will not tell us what chip we’re looking at – like Polaris, two Vega chips have been confirmed – but either way we are looking at one of them in all its alpha silicon glory. Bearing in mind HBM2’s much greater bandwidth per pin, we could very well be looking at a design for a Fiji-like 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth in the chip Raja holds. And for AMD, that is one more teaser for today to keep attention focused right where they want it: on Vega ahead of its H1’17 launch.
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jjj - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link
I get to some 500mm2 too.As for cost, Fiji was on 28nm, much cheaper on an area basis. They will get better yield for packaging but the overall costs will be much higher than with Fiji. They could have a SKU with 25% of the CUs disabled at 499$ and the full Vega 10 at 699 to .. the upper limit depends on where perf lands vs Titan X.
Yojimbo - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
One must also consider the difference in cost of the process that each chip is made with as well as the price of the larger capacity of HBM2 compared to smaller amount of HBM1. But a smaller interposer will definitely help.It'd better smoke Fiji performance-wise. I think it's a foregone conclusion that it will, though. Judging by their released benchmarks I'm guessing it'll be modestly faster than the 1080, on average, but significantly slower than a forthcoming 1080Ti. So it'll probably be priced around the same $650 as the Fury X.
jjj - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
You are rushing into judging perf in a big way.AMD is demoing Vega, just showing it up and running ,NOT showing perf. Not quite sure why so many don't get that.
You can bet that it is using early software and that it's clocked at 1-1.2GHz only for now.They are not gonna show their hand ,months before retail availability. They are just showing 4k gaming at 60FPS or better.
You can look at min perf Vega 10 should offer in many ways.
1. It is assumed to have same number of "cores" as the Fury X but almost 50% higher clocks. Then,some 15% architectural and software gains would put it on par with Titan X. So the question is, if they can do better and by how much and at what power.
A note here, given the number of cores , the scaling from 28nm to 14/16nm is very poor. They are clearly sacrificing area for huge gains elsewhere, you wouldn't do it otherwise. 16 and 8 bit is on thing but there must be a lot more.
2. Even the Polaris architecture scaled to 12.5TFLOPS and this memory bandwidth, would match the Titan X. So the question is, how much better can they do.
One could argue that AMD is nuts and Vega is worse than Polaris but that's less than reasonable.
eachus - Saturday, January 14, 2017 - link
The 12.5 TFLOPS is Vega 10 doing 16-bit floating point, not Polaris. And this, in part, explains why Vega 10 doesn't scale well compared to Fury X. There is a new compute engine with lots of new features. I'm hoping that one of them is a fused multiply-add, but we do know that it can do 16-bit floating point twice as fast as single precision (32 bit).So remember that, for now, any comparisons you see with Vega will almost certainly use none of the new features. AMD can and should spend most of their driver effort right now on changes that benefit Polaris. Some support for Vega? Sure, but don't expect support for the new features in drivers until just before (or after) Vega ships.
SunnyNW - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link
With AMD's countdown on the ve.ga site and their marketing almost everyone thought their would be a live stream incoming, but instead it was a countdown to an NDA lift, like really AMD? I believe AMD made a huge mistake here because there are A LOT of angry people out there whom were waiting with much anticipation. I kinda thought something was odd with the time being 6 a.m. PST and had told my friends as much but still they were convinced too that it was for a live stream.Why has AMD marketing been SO bad for so long, I do think they have gotten a little better in recent history but they are way behind Nvidia for example. It's like AMD has kept the same marketing team for years and years and just does not want to let them go for who knows what reason. In business when you fail for so long who are usually replaced, has AMD just been replacing under-performer after another or just keeping the same people I just don't get it.
And this is coming from someone who is an AMD supporter and would like to see them succeed.
Michael Bay - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link
Marketing is where careers go to die. If you can even call those things careers.What else do you expect?
alphasquadron - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link
Marketing for large companies is usually one of the higher paid positions. The ability to persuade a mass of people gets you paid well.eldakka - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
like a cult leader?The_Assimilator - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
This is exactly my biggest problem with AMDL: their marketing is, to be frank, absolute bullshit. It's why I don't trust them to deliver on their promises until I see independent reviewers validate them, while if Intel says their next chip is going to have an extra 10% IPC or NVIDIA says their next GPU is going to be 20% faster, I'm inclined to believe those companies.AMD marketing needs to understand the difference between hype and lies, and that consistent lies hurt them far more than they help.
Meteor2 - Friday, January 6, 2017 - link
This. I'm tiring of AMD 'teasing' products.When will it be available? What can it do? How much will it cost? This is what I want to know.