AMD will first roll out the Radeon RX 500 graphics card and immediately after, the focus will be on the RX Vega GPUs. Reports said release date of the latter will likely happen within the second quarter of 2017 or as early as May this year.
Pointing to credible sources, WCCFTech said the RX 500 will start selling no later than April. But as the cards - said to consist of the RX 580, 570, 560 and 550 - have been dubbed as mere refresh of the Polaris architecture, it is the RX Vega that seems to generate more interest. And the wait will not be long for the RX Vega unveiling, the report added.
WCCFTech said AMD has hinted that the more premium Vega 10 and 11 will feature HBM2 in various capacities. As the smaller variant, it is believed that Vega 11 will have a single HBM stack while the Vega 10 will boast of multiple stacks, which will permit the release of RX Vega GPU cards in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB configurations.
Vega GPUs, per AMD, will also find their way on upcoming notebooks. "It's also possible that the Vega 11 GPU with a single HBM2 stack will also be available as a dedicated high performance GPU for gaming and professional workstation notebooks," the report said.
And leaked details so far have suggested that the Vega architecture will more or less boast of specifications equally optimized for high-end desktop and laptop settings. WCCFTech suggested that at the minimum, the following can be expected:
- 4x Power Efficiency
- 2x Peak Throughput/Performance Per Clock
- High Bandwidth Cache
- 2x Bandwidth per pin
- 8x Capacity Per stack (2nd Generation High Bandwidth Memory)
- 512TB Virtual Address Space
- Next Generation Compute Engine
- Next Generation Pixel Engine
- Next Generation Compute Unit optimized for higher clock speeds
- Rapid Packed Math
- Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer
- Primitive Shaders
Supposedly, AMD dropped a solid clue on when the RX Vega GPUs will be touching down, indicating that release date for the hardware "is only around the corner." There were strong indicators that the next-gen Radeon cards will hit the market in late May or early June 2017.