When people think of graphic cards, people invariably make the leap to custom built gaming PCs, maxing out your frames per second (FPS) and strutting about as a member of the PC master race. However, the recently revealed AMD Radeon VEGA Frontier Edition graphics card wasn’t built for getting the smoothest possible experience in Overwatch or The Witcher 3, instead, it was designed for AI, creatives, and science pioneers.
The AMD Radeon Frontier VEGA Edition is the first such graphics card built by American Micro Devices around the VEGA architecture and its specifications are impressive. According to the company, the AMD Radeon VEGA Edition will come with 64 next-generation compute units (4096 stream processors), which will help deliver an estimated 25 TFLOPS of FP16 and an estimated 13 TFLOPS of FP32 peak performance. It’s a beast designed to handle the most demanding design, rendering, and machine intelligence workloads.
Furthermore, the graphics card comes with High Bandwidth Memory 2 technology that offers a 16GB high-bandwidth cache. This gives the chip the capability of shifting 480 gigabytes of data each second. It should be noted that this is a deviation from the more commonly used “video RAM or memory”, as AMD instead touts that the cache does not have the traditional limitations of GPU memory: “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.” According to AMD, this “revolutionary memory engine” can access terabytes of memory if needed.
Despite its clear target industry of servers and large-scale systems, it is still possible to game with the graphics card.
“Can you game on an AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition? The answer is yes, absolutely. But because this graphics card is optimized for professional use cases (and priced accordingly), if gaming is your primary reason for buying a GPU, I’d suggest waiting just a little while longer for the lower-priced, gaming-optimized Radeon RX Vega graphics card. You’ll be glad you did.”
– Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group.
Source: AMD
