Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

AMD's Vega architecture to pack power, performance in a tiny package

By

AMD Radeon RX 470
Image used with permission by copyright holder
At the AMD Tech Summit in Beijing this weekend, AMD vice president Scott Herkelman took the stage to discuss the upcoming Vega-powered graphics cards. While we didn’t get a release date, Herkelman did discuss AMD’s plans to stay competitive in the notebook GPU market.

According to VideoCardz, AMD plans to decrease the overall footprint of the upcoming mobile GPUs by stacking VRAM dies and freeing up more internal space without sacrificing performance. Size is an important consideration for notebook manufacturers, but this announcement was light on details.

Recommended Videos

It’s unclear whether or not AMD’s new Vega architecture will be rolled out to discrete mobile GPUs — the kind found in premium and gaming-oriented systems — or if it will be included in AMD’s “APUs” — a CPU/GPU combo that delivers a smaller overall footprint but a lot less graphical performance.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!
Privacy Policy

Herkelman did mention that AMD hopes the new Vega-powered mobile chips will provide notebook manufacturers with the horsepower they’ll need for their products to drive virtual reality and “the latest and greatest AAA games,” which strongly suggests that we’ll see discrete GPUs powered by the new Vega architecture. It’s unlikely even a next-gen onboard GPU would have the headroom necessary to drive any but the least demanding VR experiences.

Related

AMD’s previous architecture, code-named “Fiji,” never made a big splash in the notebook market, in part due to its overwhelming power demands. But Nvidia has had some success bringing the full-fat versions of its 10-series GPUs to notebooks despite their power consumption, indicating that there is a strong appetite for nearly desktop-grade graphical performance even if it impacts battery life.

Additionally, it appears that AMD’s Vega-powered GPUs will be available in 4GB and 8GB options, on account of the way the new chips will stack memory. Unfortunately, Herkelman didn’t offer a concrete timeline for when we might see those desktop and mobile GPUs hit the market, but reassured the Beijing audience that Vega-powered chips were “just around the corner.”

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Jayce Wagner
Jayce Wagner
Former Digital Trends Contributor
A staff writer for the Computing section, Jayce covers a little bit of everything -- hardware, gaming, and occasionally VR.
AMD CPUs just got a major performance update for games
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D installed in a motherboard.

Major motherboard brands are gearing up for the release of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 9000X3D processors with BIOS updates that add support for the new CPUs. Alongside support, some brands, such as Gigabyte and Asus, have added an "X3D Turbo Mode," which is said to boost performance by up to 35%.

The update is targeting some of the best processors packing AMD's 3D V-Cache tech, but it might give other AMD processors a boost, too. One user on X (formerly Twitter) took the update out for a spin in Forza Horizon 5 and found a 5% uplift on the Ryzen 7 9700X. That's a far cry from the 35% we've seen quoted by Gigabyte, but it's a promising performance improvement nonetheless considering that this CPU doesn't come with 3D V-Cache.

Read more
I’ve reviewed every AMD and Nvidia GPU this generation — here’s how the two companies stack up
Three graphics cards on a gray background.

Nvidia and AMD make the best graphics cards you can buy, but choosing between them isn't easy. Unlike previous generations, AMD and Nvidia trade blows point-for-point in 2024, and picking a brand to go with isn't as easy as counting the dollars in your wallet.

I've reviewed every graphics card AMD and Nvidia have released this generation, comparing not only raw performance, but also features like DLSS and FSR, ray tracing performance, and how VRAM works in modern games. After dozens of graphics card reviews, here's how AMD and Nvidia stack up against each other in 2024.
Nvidia vs. AMD in 2024

Read more
These AMD and Nvidia release date updates are giving me whiplash
PNY RTX 4080 with the power connector attached.

If you're wondering about the future of Nvidia's and AMD's top graphics cards, you're not alone. We all know it's almost time for the next generation of GPUs to be released, but no one knows when exactly that's going to happen. Today, another source weighed in with conflicting information regarding the release dates of the RTX 50 series and the RX 8000 series, and honestly, it's all starting to give me whiplash at this point.

At the beginning of 2024, most enthusiasts and leakers alike believed that all three GPU makers -- AMD, Intel, and Nvidia -- would launch their next-gen products before the end of the year. In fact, early leaks pointed to an end-of-summer release for AMD. As time went on, we've all tempered our expectations as it became clear that we're unlikely to see any new graphics cards before early 2025.

Read more