AMD's first graphics card to feature the Vega GPU architecture, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, is now available for pre-order.
We first heard that AMD was readying the Vega GPU back at CES, where the company revealed that a new graphics architecture was on the way. We were later given more juicy details about the new GPU when AMD announced the Vega Frontier Edition, which is aimed at users leveraging AI, creative, and deep learning applications. Now, the highly anticipated graphics card is finally available.
To refresh your memory, the AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition features 64 Next-Generation Compute Units (nCUs) for a total for 4,096 stream processors and supports double-rate 16-bit math, which accelerates image/video processing, ray tracing, and AI computations.
The 16GB of High-Bandwidth Cache (HBC) memory (which is really just AMD’s marketing slang for HBM2) sits on a 2048-bit memory interface. It can be used to cache external memory and storage devices, giving the Vega Frontier Edition the ability to access up to 256TB (yes, TB) of virtual memory.
AMD had previously estimated that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics card could attain up to 12.5 TFLOPs in FP32 single-precision compute performance, but the company has upped the ante with the card’s retail launch, claiming that it can achieve up to 13.1 TFLOPs. The same goes for FP16 compute performance, which was previously estimated at 25 TFLOPs and now sits at up to 26.2 TFLOPs.
The AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition comes in two varieties: air cooled or liquid cooled. The air-cooled version has a max TDP of 300W, whereas the liquid-cooled model will have a considerably higher ceiling with 375W. Both sport two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, giving away the GPU’s thirst for a decidedly high amount of power. For display output, there are three DisplayPort 1.4 interfaces and an HDMI 2.0 port.
The air-cooled version of the Vega Frontier Edition is available for preorder now for $999 from Newegg, with a release date of July 1. The water-cooled version is slated to arrive in Q3 2017 with an MSRP of $1,499.
| Product | AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition 100-506061 (Air-Cooled) |
|---|---|
| Stream Processors | 4,096 |
| Memory | 16GB HBC (HBM2) 2,048-Bit |
| Virtual Memory | Up to 275TB |
| Display Output | - DisplayPort 1.4 x3- HDMI 2.0 |
| TDP | 300W |
| Power Connectors | 8-pin (6+2-pin) x2 |
| FP32 Performance | Up to 13.1 TFLOPs |
| FP16 Performance | Up to 26.2 TFLOPs |
| MSRP | $999 |
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