Earlier today, AMD officially updated its 2018 roadmap with new information on its second generation Ryzen CPUs, APUs and 400-series motherboards. However, CPUs weren't the only focus of AMD's pre-CES festivities, as a small update has also been made to AMD's 2018 to 2020 GPU roadmap.
Last year, AMD launched its Vega graphics architecture based on the 14nm process node. This year, Vega will be getting a 7nm refresh, specifically to compete with Nvidia on the machine learning and AI front. We can expect 7nm Vega to enable General Purpose HPC clusters with new high speed I/O, and have optimizations for ‘enterprise class' deep learning training and inference.
AMD will be ‘sampling' these GPUs in 2018, meaning companies at the forefront of machine learning development will get to test them out this year. Nothing has been mentioned on the gaming front, so it looks like we'll continue seeing 14nm RX Vega 64 and 56 battle it out against the GTX 10-series. However, we may see a few new custom-cooled variants of Vega throughout the year.
AMD's GPU architecture roadmap now contains Vega 7nm for this year, Navi 7nm for 2019 and a ‘next gen' GPU based on the 7nm+ process in 2020.
KitGuru Says: We are just at the start of the year, so it's possible more information will come down as the months go on. However, for the time being it looks like we shouldn't expect a big GPU shakeup from AMD this year in the gaming space.
Vega desperately needs 7nm. If ever a GPU needed a die shrink to improve it’s thermal efficiency and cost it’s Vega.