AMD’s Navi 7nm GPUs To Feature AI Acceleration Hardware

Khalid Moammer

AMD's next generation 7nm based graphics architecture code named Navi is expected to debut sometime between 2018 and 2019. Very little is known about Navi at this point as all eyes have been on AMD's Vega graphics chips which will debut in the gaming segment next week in the form of the RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56.

Some info slipped regarding AMD's futuristic Navi architecture courtesy of Fudzilla, who report that the new graphics chip will feature AI acceleration circuitry. This could be anything from on-chip fabric, new ISA capabilities or even a dedicated AI acceleration engine akin to NVIDIA's tensor core which the company debuted with its Volta V100 accelerator earlier this year.

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AMD's First Full Fledged AI Accelerators

Navi is AMD’s third generation graphics architecture designed under the umbrella of the Radeon Technologies Group. The graphics architecture will build on the power efficiency principles of Polaris & Vega. Navi is believed to be the first GPU microarchitecture conceived entirely under graphics guru and head of the Radeon Technolgoies Group, Raja Koduri. It will employ “next gen” memory, likely third generation stacked High Bandwidth Memory or GDDR6 depending on the product to boost performance and efficiency.

Navi is the first graphics architecture from the company built on GlobalFoundries’ upcoming 7nm FinFET process. Based on what GlobalFoundries has so far publicly disclosed regarding the 7nm FinFET process, Navi should land sometime between 2018 and 2019.

AMD Radeon Graphics Architectures

WCCFTechYearConsumer
Product
GPUProcessTransistors In BillionsPerformanceMemoryBandwidth
Southern Islands2012HD 7970 GhzTahiti28nm4.3 4.1 TFLOPS3GB GDDR5264GB/s
Volcanic Islands2013R9 290XHawaii28nm6.25.6 TFLOPS4GB GDDR5320GB/s
Caribbean Islands2015R9 Fury XFiji28nm8.98.6 TFLOPS4GB HBM1512GB/s
POLARIS2016RX 480Polaris 1014nm5.75.2 TFLOPS8GB GDDR5256 GB/s
VEGA2017RX Vega 64Vega 1014nm12.513 TFLOPS8GB HBM2480GB/s
VEGA Refresh
VEGA 2
2018

2018
TBA

TBA
TBA

Vega 20
12nm

7nm
12.5

TBA
TBA

TBA
TBA

32GB HBM2
TBA

1 TB/s
NAVI2019TBANavi 107nmTBATBANextgen MemoryTBA
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