Radeon Vega Frontier Edition: First AMD Vega GPU is for the pros

13 teraflops FP32 performance and 16GB of HBM2 for compute markets with money to burn.

The first graphics card based on AMD's upcoming 14nm FinFET Vega architecture is the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, AMD revealed at its Financial Analyst Day yesterday.

Unlike AMD's previous GPU launches, Vega FE isn't targeted at consumers, but rather at the booming artificial intelligence, machine learning, and creative markets where GPUs are currently in extremely high demand. Nvidia has employed a similar strategy with the launch of its Pascal and Volta architectures, which debuted in the P100 and V100 server graphics cards.

That said, Vega Frontier Edition does provide a tantalising glimpse at the potential performance of a consumer-orientated Vega card. It features 64 compute units, which equates to 4,096 stream processors. That's the same amount as AMD's current high-end card, the Radeon Fury X. Unlike Nvidia's gargantuan V100, the first Vega GPU isn't a particularly wide chip, with performance improvements instead coming from higher clock speeds and architectural improvements.
AMD is touting performance at around 26 teraflops of half-precision FP16, or roughly 13 teraflops of single-precision FP32. That would make Vega a better performer than Nvidia's current champ, the GTX Titan Xp, which sports 12 teraflops of single-precision FP32. Feeding the GPU is 16GB of HBM2 memory on a super-wide 2048-bit bus. AMD hasn't disclosed memory speeds or GPU clock speeds for Vega FE, but somewhere around 2GHz and 1.6GHz respectively makes sense, judging by the projected performance.

Vega FE comes in two configurations. Vega FE Blue is an air-cooled card with a typical blower-style design. Vega FE Gold features a sealed liquid cooler, similar to the one used on the Fury X. It's not yet known if performance between the two cards will differ (at the very least, the Gold version will sustain its boost speeds for longer due to better cooling), but both will certainly suck down power. Vega FE uses two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. By contrast, the Titan Xp uses an 8-pin plus 6-pin configuration.

A price hasn't been set for Vega FE, but AMD produced a slide that indicates it won't be cheap. The company is chasing the lucrative $1,000+ compute market, which has a disproportionately high profit margin compared to lower-end parts. Vega FE is set for a late June release. Consumer versions of the card may take a little longer to appear, but it's likely that more details will be revealed at Computex, where AMD is holding a press conference at the end of May.

In addition to Vega FE, AMD also updated its GPU roadmap. There will be two Vega chips, based on 14nm and 14nm+ designs. The latter isn't an official GlobalFoundries designation, but hints at an improved manufacturing process. Following Vega is Navi, based on a 7nm process. Following Navi is "Next Gen," which is based on a 7nm+ process.