AMD Confirms Vega Launch For Early 2017

Thus far for 2016, we’ve seen both AMD and Nvidia reveal their new GPU architectures. Polaris and Pascal both offer improvements over previous generations along with the new process node. However, AMD has kept their top-tier chips back from Polaris, reserving them for Vega. While various rumours swirled around concerning the launch of Vega, we’re now getting official confirmation that they will arrive next year in 1H 2017.

The ambiguity of the launch stemmed from a hard to interpret roadmap AMD released earlier this year. In it, Polaris showed up for 2016 up Vega straddled a fine line between this year and the next. Given the fact that we expected some ambiguity, many had hoped for a late 2016 launch. This became a greater concern once Nvidia led Pascal into the high-end with the GTX 1080 and Titan X Pascal while Polaris did not reach previous reports of reaching into the Fury tier of performance.

There are some positive aspects to a later Vega launch. It should hopefully mean higher clocks as the 14nm node matures and wider availability, especially as HBM2 production continues to ramp up. We can also expect pricing to be cheaper. However, Nvidia will be able to reap many of the same benefits so it remains to be seen how this will all play out for AMD.