Can AMD’s VEGA really compete against Nvidia’s workstation cards? Well, only time will tell …
It’s here. The Radeon Vega that’s not for gamers, that is. After what seems like a year of waiting forward to AMD’s next generation GPU architecture, so it has finally appeared. As we all knew was going to be the case, Vega’s first foray in the market is geared at the more profitable professional sector of the market. The good news for professionals: the pricing is lower than previously reported. Instead of the expected $1,199 and $1,799 for an air cooled or water-cooled version of the card respectively, AMD is commanding a much less demanding price tag of $999 for the air cooled version (available now) and $1,499 for the water-cooled one (to be available in Q3.)
… Final specifications of the pioneer-geared graphics card point to a 1382 MHz base/typical clock, and a much more impressive 1600 MHz peak/boost clock, which drive the GPU’s 4096 stream processors and 64 ROPs. It remains to be seen if the change in nomenclature actually means something; “typical clock” sounds to me as opening the door for the card to sometimes drop its frequency below that level. Single precision performance is rated by AMD at 13.1 TFLOPS, with a not surprising half-precision 26.2 TFLOPS of computing power being on offer (these are higher than the estimated computing performance AMD shared on the announcement slides for the Frontier Edition, by the way.) Further, the Frontier Edition’s HBM 2 memory (which is probably the culprit for the release delays as AMD built up inventory) ticks at 1.89 Gbps, which, paired with the 2048-bit bus width, results in a very respectable 483 GB/s memory bandwidth.
| AMD Workstation Card Specification Comparison | ||||||
| Radeon Vega Frontier Edition | Radeon Pro Duo (Polaris) | Radeon Pro WX 7100 | Radeon Fury X | |||
| Stream Processors | 4096 | 2 x 2304 | 2304 | 4096 | ||
| Texture Units | ? | 2 x 144 | 144 | 256 | ||
| ROPs | 64? | 2 x 32 | 32 | 64 | ||
| Boost Clock | ~1.59GHz | 1243MHz | 1243MHz | 1050MHz | ||
| Single Precision | ~13 TFLOPS | 11.5 TFLOPS | 5.7 TFLOPS | 8.6 TFLOPS | ||
| Half Precision | ~26 TFLOPS | 11.5 TFLOPS | 5.7 TFLOPS | 8.6 TFLOPS | ||
| Memory Clock | ~1.88Gbps HBM2 | 7Gbps GDDR5 | 7Gbps GDDR5 | 1Gbps HBM | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 2048-bit | 2 x 256-bit | 256-bit | 4096-bit | ||
| Memory Bandwidth | ~480GB/sec | 2x 224GB/sec | 224GB/sec | 512GB/sec | ||
| VRAM | 16GB | 2 x 16GB | 8GB | 4GB | ||
| Typical Board Power | ? | 250W | 130W | 275W | ||
| GPU | Vega (1) | Polaris 10 | Polaris 10 | Fiji | ||
| Architecture | Vega | Polaris | Polaris | GCN 1.2 | ||
| Manufacturing Process | GloFo 14nm | GloFo 14nm | GloFo 14nm | TSMC 28nm | ||
| Launch Date | 06/2017 | 05/2017 | 10/2016 | 06/24/15 | ||
| Launch Price | (A profitable number) | $999 | $649 | $649 | ||
Source: Techpowerup
