Topic: Leaked hardware
Ah yes leaks, you got love em. I've stated on numerous occasions device and hardware leaks from manufacturers are almost always precursor to a not so distant future launch, and more times than none the leaks are accurate upon market launch. Latest such leaks that has brought about focal attention from the masses is from AMD, who by the way have been gabbing a large chunk of the headlines lately with their recent launch of their new flagship processor, Ryzen. Now AMD next hardware launch will come in a form of a graphics card, the Radeon RX Vega.
Various reports states that AMD plans are to launch the Vega graphics card sometime this year, drawing the battle line in the sand readying itself to go head to head against NVIDIA, which by the way just recently announced the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
Before we closely look at the rumored specs, just for the sake of throwing you some information, the AMD Vega is the name of Radeon line graphics cards which is set to launch this year. Its full fledged name is the RX Vega, circulated rumors of the graphics card being named the RX 490 or RX 580 are false
These specifications that I'm about to present to you are pending until there's an actual market launch from AMD. According to these leaked slides that was posted on the web, the Vega 10 will be the high end edition and the specs goes as follows: it will be fitted with a 14nm GFX9 processor, 64NCUs, 4096 stream processors, 16GB HBM2, a 2048-bit memory bus, a 512GB/s memory bandwidth, 3rd generation x16 PCIe.
Then we have the Vega 11, this is considered to be the low end edition though there's no full detail list of specs with this particular variant.
Key features goes as follows: a Next-generation Compute Unit (NCU), New geometry engine that is said to be supremely fast, High-bandwidth cache controller (HBCC), High Bandwidth Memory 2, Primitive Shader and like most graphics cards that's produced today, this particular brand will be power efficient.
In looking at these features in detail, the NCU produces a much scalable graphics card than previous GPU's ever produced by AMD. But power efficiency is the main focal point of this feature. Then we have the HBCC, its core responsibility is to increase frame rates to full capacity, up to 100 percent. The Geometry Engine will have increased speed by about 100 percent, it can program twice as many polygons per clock cycle.
The Primitive Shader and Draw Stream is unique feature that calculates which pixels won't be viewed in frame, and make sure each of these pixels aren't given processing time. Probably the most standout of all features in the Vega RX is HBM2, most graphics cards in particularly NIVIDA have a much narrower bus that's usually offset by high memory. What HBM2 does is double the bandwidth and modules by about 8GB.
AMD's Ryzen has posed stiff competition to Intel in both performance and price. We could see the same thing happening with the Vega graphics card, though we still haven't got full details in specs and pricing, we won't know until AMD makes its official launch which is set to take place in late Spring. I'm sure as days wind down we'll see detail specs and pricing pop up on the web, you know, the leaks. Stay tune...