I am LOVING AMD right now!
AMD today announced the Radeon VII (Radeon Seven) graphics card, implementing the world’s first GPU built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication process. Based on the 7 nm “Vega 20” silicon with 60 compute units (3,840 stream processors), and a 4096-bit HBM2 memory interface, the chip leverages 7 nm to dial up engine clock speeds to unprecedented levels (above 1.80 GHz possibly).
CEO Lisa Su states that the Radeon VII performs competitively with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card. The card features a gamer-friendly triple-fan cooling solution with a design focus on low noise. AMD is using 16 GB of 4096-bit HBM2 memory. Available from February 7th, the Radeon VII will be priced at USD $699.
Source: TPU
A Closer Look
While many have watched or at the very least seen our coverage of AMD’s live stream at CES 2019, it just can’t compare to seeing the latest graphics card from the company up close and personal. Therefore as soon as we had the opportunity, we took a closer look at the AMD Radeon VII and let us just say the reference card is indeed a bit fancy. The shroud itself is made of metal and has a very similar look and feel to the one used on the Radeon RX Vega 64 liquid cooled reference cards. However, instead of using an AIO for this release AMD instead opted for three uniform fans and a massive heatsink. Not only does this make the card more compatible with small form factor systems, it is also less of a hassle to install. Display outputs consist of 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI. Sadly AMD did not include a VirtualLink port (USB Type-C) like NVIDIA for VR headsets, which is rather odd considering AMD is also part of the VirtualLink consortium.
Power delivery is handled by two 8-pin PCIe power connectors giving the card access to a theoretical limit of 375-watts which is 75-watts more than its 300-watt TDP. Considering the Radeon VII has the same power level as the Vega 64 it offers 25% more performance at the same power level. Compute unit count falls between the Vega 56 and Vega 64 at precisely 60 CUs. That said, a few missing CUs are of no consequence when you consider how close the Vega 56 performed to the Vega 64 once tweaked. As for clock speeds AMD has stated the Radeon VII will have a 1.8 GHz core clock, while the 16 GB of HBM2 will deliver 1 TB/s of memory bandwidth over the 4096-bit memory interface.
Source: TPU
