Besides showing off their 24-core and 32-core Threadripper 2 parts AMD also let everyone know what they were up to in the graphics space. They demonstrated the world’s first GPU built on the 7nm fabrication process, which came in the form of a Radeon Vega Instinct HPC/AI accelerator. It has a 7nm GPU based on the “Vega” architecture powering it.
The chip is a MCM made up of a 7nm GPU die and 32GB of HBM2 memory stacks (4 stacks, 4096-bit memory bus). It is also AMD’s first product to feature removable InfinityFabric interface (competition to NVIDIA’s NVLink interface). Moving to 7nm allowed AMD to improve power efficiency by 2x and boost performance by 1.35x.
AMD did demo the GPU running using Cinema 4D to show that it does have working silicon ready for launch, which they say will come sometime in the second half of 2018.
So what about Radeon RX parts based on 7nm Vega? Will AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed that 7nm GPUs will enter the graphics card market. Obviously no work on when this will be, but it looks like Vega is definitely here to stay, at least for another year.
