Update - The article has been updated on the request of AMD. As stated previously in the article, the marketing image presented by AMD was not a die shot and just a marketing stunt by RTG for display at Apple's WWDC17.
Yesterday, AMD revealed the first picture of their Vega 10 graphics chip which will debut later this month. Many sites allegedly called it a die shot but AMD has confirmed that they haven't released a die shot of their upcoming graphics chip to date.
AMD Radeon Vega 10 GPU Picture Is Not a Die Shot - Real Chip Not Even Close To The Renders Shown by AMD
The Vega 10 GPU picture which was released at WWDC17 isn't a die shot but rather a marketing image cropped over the Vega chip. Many sites have alleged it to be a die shot of AMD's fastest GPU since Fiji at Apple's WWDC 17. The Vega GPU will be putting AMD back in the high-end, enthusiast market with fast graphics cards that deliver increased performance and higher efficiency compared to older 28nm parts. Based on the 14nm FinFET architecture, Vega will feature a range of new technologies, some of which include HBM2 and HBCC.
The news comes straight from Scott Wasson who's the senior manager of product marketing at AMD (Previously Editor in Chief at The Tech Report). Scott mentions over at his twitter feed that the die shot was not real. He also mentioned that AMD has not released any specifics of die size so all information that is currently roaming the internet is speculation at best.
Just saying that's not a real die shot. Don't think we've released die size or such info yet.
— Scott Wasson (@scottwasson) June 5, 2017
Well to be honest, the image isn't even a die shot to begin with and that was the original intention of this article to report the misinterpretation by several media outlets calling it as such. There's a difference between a block diagram and die shot. The picture shown on the Vega chip is closer to a block diagram rather than a die shot. It's also worth noting that this isn't the first time an Apple event discussing AMD tech has faked marketing material.
Last year, Apple announced their Macbook Pro with AMD Polaris GPUs. It was seen in one of the marketing slides that Apple did a very bad job of copy/paste over the GPU die of Polaris. If you look closely, you will see an Intel Skylake die shot shopped over the Polaris GPU which looks really unprofessional.
Everything mentioned about Vega aside from the faked block diagram was reiteration of all the things we know about Vega till know. There's no new information on Vega at the moment and it seems like the wait keeps on going as we wait for the first gaming Vega graphics card to arrive in August of 2017 which is two months away.
| GPU Family | AMD Vega | AMD Navi | NVIDIA Pascal | NVIDIA Volta |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flagship GPU | Vega 10 | Navi 10 | NVIDIA GP100 | NVIDIA GV100 |
| GPU Process | 14nm FinFET | 7nm FinFET | TSMC 16nm FinFET | TSMC 12nm FinFET |
| GPU Transistors | 15-18 Billion | TBC | 15.3 Billion | 21.1 Billion |
| GPU Cores (Max) | 4096 SPs | TBC | 3840 CUDA Cores | 5376 CUDA Cores |
| Peak FP32 Compute | 13.0 TFLOPs | TBC | 12.0 TFLOPs | >15.0 TFLOPs (Full Die) |
| Peak FP16 Compute | 25.0 TFLOPs | TBC | 24.0 TFLOPs | 120 Tensor TFLOPs |
| VRAM | 16 GB HBM2 | TBC | 16 GB HBM2 | 16 GB HBM2 |
| Memory (Consumer Cards) | HBM2 | HBM3 | GDDR5X | GDDR6 |
| Memory (Dual-Chip Professional/ HPC) | HBM2 | HBM3 | HBM2 | HBM2 |
| HBM2 Bandwidth | 484 GB/s (Frontier Edition) | >1 TB/s? | 732 GB/s (Peak) | 900 GB/s |
| Graphics Architecture | Next Compute Unit (Vega) | Next Compute Unit (Navi) | 5th Gen Pascal CUDA | 6th Gen Volta CUDA |
| Successor of (GPU) | Radeon RX 500 Series | Radeon RX 600 Series | GM200 (Maxwell) | GP100 (Pascal) |
| Launch | 2017 | 2019 | 2016 | 2017 |
