AMD unveils the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, the "fastest graphics card on the planet"

midian182

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Nvidia got a lot of attention last week when it unveiled the Tesla V100, a high-performance computing chip based on the company’s seventh-generation Volta architecture. Now, it's AMD’s turn in the spotlight. At its Financial Analysts Day call, the company revealed the first Radeon graphics card based on its Vega architecture: the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition.

As with Nvidia’s latest accelerator, AMD is aiming for the professional market with this GPU; think workstations, machine learning, AI, game developers, advanced visualization, etc. which means it’ll have a $1000+ price tag that’ll help boost AMD’s profits.

When it comes to specs, the Frontier is quite a beast. It boasts 64 “next generation compute units” (4096 stream processors) producing 13 teraflops of single precision (FP32) performance and around 25 teraflops of half precision (FP16) performance. AMD is calling it “the fastest graphics card on the planet.”

The 14nm card, which features 8K display support, also comes with 480GB/sec of memory bandwidth and 16GB of HBM2 memory. It uses AMD's High-Bandwidth Cache Controller memory architecture, which allows applications to quickly and easily access off-card storage like system DRAM, non-volatile RAM, and networked storage like SSDs and HDDs.

"Thanks to automatic, fine-grained memory movement controlled by the high bandwidth cache controller, Vega enables creators and designers to work with much larger, more detailed models and assets in real time," the company explains on its product website.

Anandtech has provided a helpful comparison table:

AMD revealed some benchmarks comparing the Frontier’s performance to Nvidia’s Titan Xp. The red team's GPU was 27 percent faster when using 3D CAD program Catia and 70 percent quicker in Solidworks, another piece of CAD software. There was also an on-stage demo of the Frontier pushing Sniper Elite 4 to 60 - 70 fps in 4K.

The Frontier will be released in late June. No word yet on pricing, but you can guarantee it will be expensive.

While the card is primarily aimed at enterprise users – AMD is advising gamers to hold off on buying one and wait for the cheaper gaming cards – it gives us some idea of what to expect when the Vega-based consumer GPUs launch in the second half of this year.

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It's not an important accolade. It's not as though it'll remain at the top of the pile for very long before it get booted from it's perch.
 
"AMD is advising gamers to hold off on buying one and wait for the cheaper gaming cards"

Given AMD buyers are typically more budget orientated I don't see one going out and throwing down over $1k on a GPU just for temporary bragging rights. That's still reserved for the *****s of the world who need to have the Titan. And besides, this won't be a title held for long.
 
According to online resources, it will have TDP = 300W

And I don't believe what AMD claims, showing some specially optimized software, as usual.

I'm guessing that the opening price will be something like $1499.
 
So they compare it to the Titan, but then tell gamers not to buy it.... so why aren't they comparing it to the Tesla?

I'm guessing because it doesn't beat it.... and the new Tesla v100 will probably be faster as well... No real news until we see the first "gamer" card using Vega...
 
It's unusual for AMD to race for performance title. They were more budget oriented until now. I wouldn't get my hopes up for AMD, we will have to wait and see.
 
So is this a pro card or not? My only interest would be for crypto currency mining but it's probably too inefficient for that.
 
That comparison to radeon Fury X is hideous. Compare it to a proper card like the titan x or gtx 1080ti.
 
That comparison to radeon Fury X is hideous. Compare it to a proper card like the titan x or gtx 1080ti.

How about Titan Xp?
Radeon-Vega-Frontier-Edition_Performance.png


but that is a bit irrelevant, because it still loses to Quadro cards I think (quadro catia results for example):
quadro-spec2_PCPER.png

although this might be also misleading, because I have no clue how you can set up the test and what settings can be changed and if the vega and the quadro results are even in the same scale.
 
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but that is a bit irrelevant, because it still loses to Quadro cards I think (quadro catia results for example):
quadro-spec2_PCPER.png

although this might be also misleading, because I have no clue how you can set up the test and what settings can be changed and if the vega and the quadro results are even in the same scale.

Doubling score makes it almost as good as P5000, that test uses only one GPU.
 
Yet they claim to be the world's fastest.... and that's assuming perfect 100% scaling....

That Radeon Pro Duo on lower graph is 2016 28nm card. Upper graph has 2017 14nm Radeon Vega.

How does that make it a fair comparison? Just wondering, seeing as I know nothing of Radeon Pro or Quadro. Are we comparing 2x dual GPU's with 1x quad GPU?

Yes, Radeon Pro Duo is dual GPU and it's primarily meant for VR development. That test uses only single GPU.
 
Nvidia uses Quadro name for "professional" graphic cards, despite there is word "quad", AFAIK all Quadros are single GPU cards.

This is not to correct, rather elaborate.

The NVidia Quadro line predates quad processors. The name is just a name.

Depending on possible etymology assuming there is one and it was not just a word made up that matched other words, it came from either quadrum or quattuor. Quadro from quadrum is a noun and means a square, picture/painting, description/outline/sketch, diamond pip on playing cards. It also is the word the French word cadre comes from. Quadro from quattuor is a verb means to make square/four sided/four cornered, to put in order/complete/perfect, to agree.

The NVidia Quadro line has been around for at least a decade, I cannot find the actual release date. I believe the first time I saw the video card was when I was looking at Falcon Northwest to build me a custom machine. That would have been around 2005 as the processor was the newly released dual core AMD Athlon. (Intel had no multi-core processors until 2007 for either consumer or enterprise chips.)

I guess it might be possible to think Quadro meant a single card quad GPU because in 2005 both SLI and Crossfire existed. To my knowledge there has never been a single card quad GPU yet. Anyone actually building a computer, especially one that would have a Quadro card would know this. Therefore I am sure NVidia had no intention of presenting their card as "quad" anything. No more than parents who named their sons Richard little knowing what the diminutive would come to mean.
 
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