Stefan Mileschin

Current plan: will never be

Many AMD fanboys hoped that Vega 7 nm would be a GPU that could make Vega more competitive to Nvidia's offering.

Vega 14nm failed to win the performance war against the Geforce 1080 TI and found itself fighting the Geforce 1080. The 7nm version of the chip should improve the odds, but AMD doesn’t plan to bring this into the light of day as a GPU.

Vega 7 - according to both Lisa Su and a few others at AMD’s January technology gig - was always presented as an instinct/artificial intelligence product. This is the main focus and some other people high up in the GPU hierarchy at AMD have repeatedly confirmed that Vega 7 nm is an AI chip and not a GPU.

At that time, Fudzilla believed that this was a business move, where the company first introduced a more lucrative product that would cost more and then when the driver and everything else was ready, it would follow up with a GPU.

Unfortunately, there is no Vega 7 nm GPU on AMD’s gaming GPU roadmap right, now nor is it planned. Nvidia is expected to launch its Turing GPU later this year, probably for "back to school" or the holiday season and the performance gap will further increase. We had this confirmed from multiple sources close to the matter.

Just think about the performance delta Nvidia can gain with a GPU that is designed with Ray Tracing algorithms (RTX) in mind. This is not great news for AMD fanboys as they will have to wait for 2019 until they see something really new.

Navi is next in line - again at 7nm - but it is not clear when this is supposed to launch, just at some point in 2019. One can only hope that AMD can change its plan and transform Vega 7nm into a GPU.

The key reason for not making Vega 7nm a gaming GPU is the pricing, as a GPU powered by rather expensive HBM 2 memory would be too expensive and Ethereum crazy currency seems to be heading in a down trajectory.

https://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/4...m-is-not-a-gpu