Some interesting AMD news in a bunch
Ryzen 2, Vega 11, GDDR6 and others - James Prior, AMD’s product manager, told a foreign portal.
The veil fell from the hitherto unknown Vega 11. Now it turns out it’s not a dGPU, it’s Raven Ridge’s IGP, so the APU offers 704 shader processing units in full (na) - engineers may not activate all the resources. Just as a reminder; the mobile variants published so far have 8 and 10 CU, respectively, and independent measurements have already come to light. Unfortunately, we haven’t received any news of when the desktop Raven Ridge will debut, however, motherboard manufacturers have already begun preparations, for example, ASUS released the required BIOS update last week.
Stay with the Vega family. You must have noticed that the new series has started with a very moaning start. James Prior confirmed that it was indeed difficult to start production - presumably the problems caused by HBM2 - but the supply disruptions had now essentially disappeared. In this way, traders can reduce prices in order to improve their competitiveness, and in parallel with wearing out the reference models, individual solutions can finally arrive. The improvement in care has already been confirmed by several sources, again who did well who played the wait.
It seems that the above statement no longer holds true for the AM4 socket. Fortunately, AMD has not copied Intel’s dense socket switch, the current platform will stay with us until 2020. The new Ryzen series, due next spring, will only be available for use with current boards after a simple BIOS update. The first refinement of the Zen architecture (“Zen +”) omits radical, higher-risk changes - this may not be necessary now - and in addition to the production update (12 nm bandwidth), there are likely to be only a few bug fixes (erratum). Work has already begun before the first Ryzen tiles are launched, but this is standard practice anyway. If engineers have managed to break through the current clock ceiling on current processors in the meantime - it now runs at 4100-4200 MHz - we could get maybe a 10-15% performance improvement. A major transformation of the architecture is only expected after that. While this is still the music of the distant future, according to present plans, these chips (Zen2) can also be inserted into the AM4 socket.
Finally, it has been proven that RTG (Radeon Technologies Group) has been working on the implementation of GDDR6 chips for a year and a half, so the manufacturer will introduce all major graphics memory technologies on the market in its current portfolio next year - GDDR5X in 2018 will be a side player.
