AMD Tech Summit 2017 Video Reveals New Vega Details

Have you been missing out on the action from the AMD Tech Summit 2017? The team over at VideoCardz have managed to dig out a source video which wasn’t overdubbed with Chinese, meaning we can now watch and listen with relative ease. Not only did it cover topics like Ryzen 5, but they also shed some new light on Vega.

As you may already know, AMD is not exactly popular in the notebook and mobile markets, but that could all be about to change with Vega.  Scott Herkelman, the vice-president of AMD, took to the stage to detail upcoming Vega hardware for notebooks and beyond. Since the new GPU tech uses stacked VRAM dies, it requires less space on the PCB, and that’s appealing to notebook manufacturers as it means slimmer and lighter systems. Of course, since Vega is a new architecture, it also promises huge performance improvements for both graphics and power requirements, something that we didn’t get with the launch of Fiji. Scott said that OEM partners could create “thinner and lighter notebooks, that still pack that punch you need to drive virtual reality or the latest and greatest AAA games.” However, it’s not sure if that’s all within the same product range, as thinner and lighter could be APU based tech, VR and AAA games by dedicated mobile GPUs.

“Vega will use HBM2 that has different capacity stacks” said Herkelman, “you will see from our board partners different configurations, whether that’s 4 Gig or 8 Gig or those types of memory architectures that will allow you to drive different games and different resolutions based upon what capacity stack they end up using”. he added.

AIBs should have the option to chose single or double stacks of HBM2, by doing so, they can increase the memory bandwidth as they add more stacks. The higher the bandwidth, the higher the resolutions and general performance we’ll be able to achieve. What variants of cards we’ll see because of this is unknown, but I like the modular approach as it can allow AIBs to scale up/down their cards to different price/performance ratios more easily.

As for the Vega launch, all he had to say was that Vega is “Just around the corner” and as vague as that is, we guess with Computex right around the corner, that’ll be where we get a lot more information, maybe even some launches.