AMD will release Vega GPU with hbm2 in 2017

AMD gave a glimpse of its GPU roadmap at the GDC in San Francisco. After the Polaris generation that will be released this year, the chip generation codenamed Vega will come in 2017, followed by Navi in ​​2018. Vega has high bandwidth memory 2.

AMD briefly showed the roadmap during its Capsaicin presentation at GDC for game developers. On the roadmap, the manufacturer reiterates that the upcoming Polaris architecture should deliver 2.5 times the performance per watt of the previous generation. New on the roadmap is the Vega architecture, which should appear next year. AMD explicitly mentions the presence of hbm2, which indicates that the video cards with Polaris GPU will not yet have this high-bandwidth memory of the second generation.

Last week there was a rumor that an upcoming card from Nvidia with Pascal GPU will be equipped with gddr5x instead of hbm2. Samsung started the mass production of hbm2 at the beginning of this year, but it seems that the first cards with the fast memory will have to wait a little longer.

On the roadmap, Vega is close to Polaris. Perhaps Vega is a variant of Polaris with hbm2, which AMD can release relatively quickly, possibly late 2016 or early 2017. In 2018, Navi is due to appear, a new architecture that AMD describes as ‘scalable’ and which must be combined with memory of a new generation. AMD did not disclose details about Vega and Navi.

The roadmap was part of a presentation about the difficulties that the AMD-titled ‘immersive era’ will bring to GPU manufacturers and game developers. For a good display of virtual reality and photo-realistic images, the combination of GPU and engine must process considerably more megapixels per second, the company envisages.