AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition with 16 GB HBM2 will be released at the end of June

With the architecture Polaris and the Radeon RX 400 series, AMD made a conscious choice not to take up the fight for the top tier, but invested wholeheartedly in the middle class. The same pattern followed with the refreshed Radeon RX 500 series, which in terms of performance stays at the same level as the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060.

This will change with the introduction of the Vega architecture, which AMD has promised to launch in the second quarter of 2017 for around six months. During the company’s Financial Analyst Day 2017, graphics manager Raja Koduri fulfills the promise of Vega – but not for the enthusiast market.

The first graphics card with Vega is called Radeon Vega Frontier Edition and is aimed at professional users, where AMD, like Nvidia, hits the big drum for machine learning. When graphics cards are released, it should be the fastest on the market in that respect, but how Vega will stand up to the Nvidia Tesla V100, which is based on the Volta architecture with specialized Tensor cores, is not clear.

In terms of specifications, AMD does not go into any further details, but reveals that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition has a computing power of approximately 13 TFLOPS at single precision (FP32) and 25 TFLOPS at half precision (FP16). This means that the 64 computing units or 4,096 stream processors have a maximum clock frequency of around 1,550 MHz.

Furthermore, the graphics card is equipped with 16 GB of graphics memory of the HBM2 type, which is connected via a 2,048-bit memory bus. The bandwidth is set to approximately 480 GB / s, which with the bus width in mind corresponds to an effective clock frequency of 1,875 MHz for the memory.

AMD has on previous occasions talked about energy efficiency with the architecture Vega, but judging by the pictures, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition becomes a thirsty story. The graphics card has two 8-pin PCI Express connectors, which together with its PCI Express 3.0 connection means a power consumption of up to 375 W according to the ATX standard.

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The launch of the AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition takes place at the end of June at an as yet unknown price tag. The graphics card is released in two variants – an air-cooled with blue casing and a gold-colored with water-cooled.