AMD showcase their Vega Frontier Edition GPU

  

  

At this event, AMD announced their Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, a GPU that is not designed for gaming, hence the lack of Radeon RX branding, but for designers, engineers and scientists. 

This GPU will come with 13TFLOPs of FP32 performance and 16GB of HBM2 memory, delivering more performance than any of AMD’s previous GPU offerings. 

  

When using the Deepbench benchmark utility, AMD showcased that their Radeon Vega was able to easily outperform Nvidia’s Pascal-based Tesla P100 GPU, with the Nvidia Tesla P100 taking 50% longer to complete the same task. 

This means that Vega will be a great performer in the datacenter, which gives AMD a clear position in this market with an opportunity to even compete favourably against Volta, with Nvidia’s upcoming Tesla V100 offering 40-50% more compute performance than the Tesla P100. 

  

When compared to the Radeon R9 Fury X, Vega is expected to offer 50% more compute performance, which means that Vega should at least deliver 50% more gaming performance without accounting for any other architectural/design changes. 

AMD says that their Vega GPUs will be arriving in Late June, though at this time it is unknown when the company plans to release their gaming oriented RX Vega series of products. 

  

AMD also plans to create a Radeon Pro Vega SSG, combining Radeon Vega with a 2TB NVMe SSD to deliver a GPU with a full 2TB frame buffer which utilises Vega’s high-bandwidth memory controller to allow this GPU to handle insanely large datasets. 

This will allow Vega to scrub large video files with ease and allow GPUs to accelerate the computation of larger datasets than ever before, opening a lot of interesting new possibilities for GPU compute. 

  

AMD has now shown that Vega will be useful for a wide range of applications, from gaming all the way to professional applications. 

With this wide potential market, it will be very interesting to see if AMD will be able to keep up with demand at launch. Let’s hope that Vega will be able to keep up with these high expectations and keep up with market demand. 

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Radeon Vega Frontier Edition on the OC3D Forums.