With NVIDIA’s announcement of their GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070 graphics cards, AMD has reportedly moved up the launch of their next big silicon Vega10. It was scheduled for an early-2017 launch, but it has been moved to October 2016. The reasoning behind this is if the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 live up to what NVIDIA is saying then AMD could be woefully outperformed.
Vega10 is a successor to “Grenada” and will be built on the 5th generation Graphics CoreNext architecture. Vega10 is a multi-chip module that will feature HBM2 memory and will be built on the 14 nm architecture, which will offer an even better performance / watt than the upcoming “Polaris” chips.
Now Vega10 is not a sucessor to Fiji, that is actually reserved for Vega11. It has been speculated that Vega10 will feature 4096 stream processors and will power graphics cards that will compete with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. Vega11 is expected to feature 6144 stream processors, and could take on the bigger GP100-based SKUs. Both Vega10 and Vega11 will feature 4096-bit HBM2 interfaces, but could offer different memory sizes.
So what does this mean for Polaris? That these cards will not even compete with the GTX 1080 and 1070? We will have to see.
