While AMD’s focus for much of this year has been on its Ryzen processors, it should be said that the company has definitely been working hard on the development of its new GPU. In fact, the company has said that it was still on point for launching its new Radeon Vega GPU based on the 7nm die lithography before the end of 2018.
According to a press release published on AMD’s site, the company essentially says that the new 7nm Radeon Vega GPUs would be based on its new “Navi” GPU architecture. The company has reportedly already taped out “multiple 7nm products” with TSMC, its new semiconductor partner.
Concurrently, AMD also stated that the same 7nm chips would be used in the production of its second generation Zen 2 CPU cores. However, AMD only plans on launching its future CPUs based on the 7nm chips later in 2019.
For context, AMD switched partners from GlobalFoundries to TSMC when new broke that the former would cease the production of any and all 7nm chips. Prior to this, GlobalFoundries was responsible for providing the 14nm and 12nm chips that is found in AMD’s Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs. Instead, the company announced that it would be focusing “exclusively” on the production of 14nm chips.
AMD’s first 7nm Radeon GPU first came to light back at Computex 2018. During its keynote, AMD gave a brief demonstration of the GPU’s prowess when it used Maxon Cinema4D and Radeon ProRender engine. No technical details of the GPU was divulged that day, but AMD did state that the 7nm GPU used during the demo did come with 32GB of HBM2 memory.
It should also be noted that Navi will also be AMD’s last GPU generation to be built using the company’s already aged GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture.
