The upcoming AMD Radeon RX 490 is said to be Vega-based. (Photo : YouTube/AdoredTV)
AMD is not making the rumored Radeon RX 490 as its 2017 flagship graphics card. Instead, the giant chipmaker is likely to introduce the RX 500 GPU series that will be on Vega 10 architecture with up to 16GB of HBM2 memory, a new report said.
Days before 2017 replaces 2016, AMD took to Twitter and hinted of the new GPU architecture that will greet the fresh year:
New Year. New architecture. pic.twitter.com/VDpSXpArFh
— Radeon RX (@Radeon) December 27, 2016
According to WCCFTech, AMD is likely teasing about the Vega graphics cards series or the RX 500 GPUs. "The AMD Vega GPU will be embedded inside a new generation of Radeon RX series cards. There isn't much room to fill inside the Radeon RX 400 series so my best guess would be a new family for Vega. It certainly makes more marketing sense since a full-fledged Radeon RX 500 series lineup sounds much better," the report said.
And like the RX 400 series, consumers and GPU enthusiasts alike can expect multiple card releases from the company that will boast of the GDDR5, GDRR5X and HBM2 flavors. One possible variant is seen to highlight the capabilities demoed recently by AMD with the Instinct MI25 Accelerator, which the report said packs a maximum compute performance of 12.5 TFLOPs or within the same powerful GPU zone that is occupied by NVIDIA's flagship GeForce GTX 1080.
The same RX 500 card is likely to debut with 16GB capacity for the enthusiast market and 8GB for the general consumer. The former has a memory bandwidth of 512 GB/s on an HBM2 interface, which means there will be two stacks of 2048-bit memory bus at 1000MHz or four stacks of 4096-bit memory bus at 500MHz, WCCFTech added on its report.
As for the real-world performance of the RX 500 series, the same report pointed to recent benchmark testing from AMD that showcased the Vega 10 GPU outmuscling its nearest competition. And with the HBM2 memory, the card is also said to be optimized with AI or artificial intelligence acceleration.
AMD teasing its coming Vega 10 cards that likely will be part of the Radeon RX 500 series seems to sideline the rumored RX 490 that in recent reports is believed to be the first graphics card on the Vega GPU architecture. With the latest development, it's likely that the RX 490 is intended to be a dual Polaris 10 GPU should the card still come out.
It has to be the Las Vegas CES 2017 in early January that will serve as the intro platform for the Vega 10 RX 500 GPU series, the report said, and possibly alongside the Zen-based Ryzen Summit Ridge CPUs that AMD is set to unleash in the first quarter of next year.
