AMD’s first Vega 10 card may launch in December

Pricing to be similar with GTX 1080

Yesterday,  a possible release date surfaced for AMD’s upcoming high-performance GPU based on Vega 10 architecture with HBM2 memory.

Since March, some sources expected that AMD would bring its Vega 10 launch forwards to October in order to regain some high-end GPU market share from Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1080 and 1070. We were later able to confirm towards the end of September that at least one Vega 10-based card should be launching, at least on paper, before the end of this year. Now, at least one source has said the card will be announced and launched in December, with the company then planning to ship higher volumes in early 2017.

AMD has already said it does not plan to release any higher-performing Polaris 10 cards above the Radeon RX 480 that was announced in June. According to a product roadmap from its Capsaicin event at GDC 2016 in San Francisco, the term “Polaris” is positioned on the chart right at the “mid-2016” mark, while “Vega” is positioned right above the year “2017.” At the very least, this gives the indication that a Radeon product announcement based on the new architecture could happen before the end of the year.

Back in July, RTG Senior Product Manager Evan Groenke confirmed that all Polaris 10 products will only have 36 compute units, and the Radeon RX 480 currently uses all 2304 stream processors across 36 CUs. Earlier rumors had suggested that AMD would launch a 40 CU version of the card at a later date, though the company seems to be moving forward with a new architecture launch instead.

4096 stream processors

The company’s first Vega 10-based card is expected to feature 4,096 stream processors based on an updated Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, with up to 12 teraflops of single-precision compute performance and 16GB of HBM2 memory. As for bandwidth, performance is expected to be similar to the Radeon Pro Duo with at least 512GB/s, while the TDP should be close to 225W. Whether this card will remain part of the Radeon RX 400 series family also remains to be confirmed.

The card should be positioned close to Nvidia’s reference GTX 1080 which starts at $ 599 on the low end.