NVIDIA has pushed out the GTX 1080 Ti and lately we’ve seen the launch of the RX 500 series cards.
But it’s really AMD’s Vega GPUs that people have been holding out for. Earlier this morning the company confirmed it would start shipping the first Vega GPUs – although not the consumer cards people are expecting – from the end of next month – and as an added bonus, there’s a new 16 core CPU to boot.
The details on both vary, so we’ll do this in reverse order. AMD’s latest CPU, which will undeniably be pitched against the recently leaked Skylake-X and upcoming Kaby Lake-X offerings from Intel, will have 16 cores, 32 threads, and will sport the name of “Threadripper”.
We don’t have any details on pricing or a specific release date beyond the Australian winter, although it’s expected that AMD will announce more about the CPU at Computex at the end of the month. It’s pitched as a “ultra-premium” desktop CPU, meaning it will probably cost close to, if not more than, $1000 locally. That said, AMD might decide to be super aggressive with their pricing (but given that previous CPUs in this category have cost over $2000 locally, thanks to a lack of competition, don’t expect it to be too affordable).
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/05/report-intel-will-introduce-the-i9-series-later-this-year/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/01/intel-ces-2017-project-alloy.jpg” title=”Report: Intel Will Introduce The i9 Series Later This Year” excerpt=”It’s already been a big year in the CPU market with the successful launch of AMD’s Ryzen CPUs. But it’s not over yet. Intel has a new line of CPUs of their own, starting with Skylake-X in June this year.”]
But the real icing on the cake, which turned out really to be just the cherry, was some confirmation around Vega. Vega is AMD’s follow-up to the Polaris line of GPUs, which started with the RX 400 series last year.
Some unverified benchmarks have been appearing on the internet over the course of the last few weeks. And while those are fun to speculate about, they’re unverified, and they’re also not real-world figures. But what is now officially known is that the first Vega product, the Vega Frontier Edition, will go on the market from late June.
Bad news: the Vega FE card isn’t marketed to gamers. AMD’s pitching it as the fastest graphics card on the market, with 16GB of HBM2 memory, but none of their internal benchmarks or messaging aimed the card at gamers in the slightest.
Much like the Polaris cards last year, Computex seems like the right territory for AMD to start talking about Vega gaming cards. And at the very least, the analyst briefing gives people a rough idea of when they can expect things to materialise – in other words, definitely not this month, and probably not for most of June either.
As an aside, the rest of the Ryzen lineup is still coming later this year as well. The Ryzen 3 CPUs are still scheduled to land in the third quarter, while the first Ryzen APU will appear in consumer products from the second half of this year.