We’ve talking Radeon VII with AMD – Vega at 7 nanometers

During CES 2019, very exciting hardware from a whole host of manufacturers will be unveiled. One of the perhaps most enthusiastic hardware in progress is AMD. In a live keynote, the company showed, among other things, one of the first engineering copies of the Ryzen 3000 series. Slightly more surprising was perhaps the new graphics card that was shown – Radeon VII.

SweClockers is on site and has agreed with AMD on the company’s latest product. Radeon VII was originally not intended to be released to consumers, as the Vega 20 circuit on which it is based was intended for machine learning and data centers. However, AMD made a U-turn, and now the graphics circuit is reaching ordinary consumers.

Vega 20 measures 331 mm² and is manufactured at TSMC with the company’s very latest 7-nanometer technology. Thanks to this, the circuit has shrunk from Vega 10’s 484 mm² and at the same time has significantly higher clock frequencies. The turbo frequency takes the step from 1,546 MHz in Vega 64, to around 1,800 MHz in Radeon VII.

The clock frequency has not yet been nailed down, but in conversations with AMD it appears that it is expected to land around 1,750 MHz as an average for game loads. It is this together with some minor optimizations on the circuit that accounts for the performance improvements, where the Radeon VII is said to perform about 30 percent better than the Vega 64.

This puts the Radeon VII on a straight collision course with the Geforce RTX 2080, which, however, offers features such as ray tracing and higher energy efficiency. To compete, AMD has equipped the Radeon VII with a total of 16 GB of HBM2 memory, where four circuits are tough at 2,000 MHz. Together with a memory bus of 4,096 bits, this provides a proper boost to the memory bandwidth, which lands at a sky-high 1 TB / s.

AMD hopes this will be able to attract buyers from the green team, not least as memory bandwidth often becomes extra important when playing in 4K UHD resolution.

Self-developed cooler with passive operation

When it comes to cooling, AMD takes care to take in properly, whereupon a cooling device model larger with as many as three fans is on the menu. In addition, it now appears in conversations with AMD that the cooler can handle passive operation as the graphics card does not work so hard, something Nvidia does not offer on its reference cards.

However, the large cooler can have its cause, where the power supply consists of two 8-pin PCI Express connectors. This, together with the motherboard’s power supply via the PCI Express connection, means a maximum power output of 375 watts. However, Radeon VII has been expected in advance to be a thirsty card.

According to AMD, the reference cooler may be the only version in which the Radeon VII is launched, after which a large part of the impression depends on a single model. The company is not said to close the door on partner manufacturers who want to release their own custom Radeon VII, but at present there are no plans for such cards.

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AMD’s flagship Radeon VII will be released on February 7 at a price of 699 USD, corresponding to 7,800 kronor including VAT. The purchase includes a game package, which contains the new version of Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry 5 and the Swedish-developed major game The Division 2. For the first time, the card is also sold from AMD’s website, something that is not believed to affect Sweden.

Read more about AMD’s graphics plans