Graphics Cards - Page 199

ASRock made quite the splash with its new Phantom Gaming series of Radeon RX 500 series cards a few months ago, but it looks like the company is set to release the Radeon RX Vega variants in reference form, which is kinda boring.

Both of the new Vega-based cards will come in Phantom Gaming X form, with both the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 variants arriving in reference form, without any technological changes to the cooler... so don't expect cooler operation or quieter gaming at all. We will see the usual specs from the cards, with 8GB of HBM2 being the highlight here.

ASRock Phantom Gaming X RX Vega 64 Specs:

It's the best way to start the week: new rumors on AMD's latest graphics technology hitting our gaming PCs... but when will it happen? What will they be? WCCFTech is back at it again, with some serious click bait-y rumors on 'Polaris 30' and Vega 20 on 7nm for gamers.

The site is sourcing a post on Chiphell that states Polaris 30 will arrive later this year, yet another rebadged and refreshed Polaris after Polaris 10 and Polaris 20. Polaris 30 would arrive in Q4 2018 before the big push into Navi next year which will be a mid-range part that should include GDDR6 technology.

The more interesting part here is not Polaris 30 (which according to my sources will not be happening) as my source has said "AMD will have nothing new for close to a year", but it is Vega 20 on 7nm for gamers. AMD has already teased Vega 20 on 7nm at Computex 2018 as part of an upcoming refresh of Radeon Instinct, but what about gamers? We want a new high-end GPU as well, right?!

We knew that from the last lot of leaks from an internal AMD slide last year that the company was planning PCIe 4.0 support for its upcoming Vega 20 GPU, and now we have some more support for these claims.

AMD engineers are hard at work on Linux drivers for its fresh new Vega 20, which is being made on the smaller 7nm node. The new PCIe 4.0 standard will usher in some huge bandwidth increases, as PCIe 3.0 has been with us for close to a decade now and feels stale with its 8.0GT/s of raw bit rate and 8Gbps of link bandwidth, where PCIe 4.0 doubles those numbers to 16GT/s and 16Gbps of bandwidth.

The previous rumor pegged Vega 20 for the second half of 2018, made on the 7nm node with 4-stack HBM2 giving us 1TB/sec with 16GB or 32GB HBM to choose from, PCIe 4.0 x16 support and between 150-300W of power. Now we can expect PCIe 4.0 motherboards around the corner, perfect timing for AMD to push into the datacenter.

It seems NVIDIA is ramping up towards something big with a new prototype turning up just days after the company celebrated Alan Turing's birthday, we have a picture of a prototype board of a next-gen GPU.

The board in question has 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and 12 modules of Micron's super-fast GDDR6 technology on-board, as well as what seems like NVLink connectivity at the top. There's no GPU on the board itself, but with the 12 modules of GDDR6 we could see a next-gen GeForce GTX 1180 with 12GB of GDDR6 RAM.

This might not be a new GeForce GPU, and could be a new Tesla (based on Turing). From what I've been told the new GeForce will be a heavily refined Pascal GPU architecture named Ampere, while the GPU to succeed Volta will be Turing. This could very well be a Turing-based card being tested with GDDR6, mostly for the strange connectivity at the top of the board, which could be NVLink.

NVIDIA truly dominates the AI supercomputer race with its Tensor Core GPUs, and now the company has announced today that the world's top AI supercomputers are ALL powered by NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs.

The new list of the world's 500 fastest systems sees NVIDIA taking the top spots with Tensor Core GPUs, with the two latest AI supercomputers securing the #1 and #3 spots of the world's fastest supercomputers with Summit, and Sierra, respectively. The fastest supercomputer in Japan, ABCI, is also powered by NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs.

GPUs now power 5 out of 7 of the world's fastest systems, and better yet NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs power 17 of the 20 most energy efficient systems on the GREEN500 list. Most of the GREEN500 systems are NVIDIA GPUs, just the nail the point home that NVIDIA dominates the supercomputer market.

NVIDIA seems to be ramping up into its next-gen GeForce GTX 11 series graphics card launch, with teases from TSMC entering 7nm production with NVIDIA as a customer, and GDDR6 going into mass production over the next few months. During Computex 2018, we heard that NVIDIA would be announcing the GTX 1180 on July 30, while AIB partners told me they would have cards on the market in August or September.

But it was a tweet by the official NVIDIA Twitter account that celebrated Alan Turing's birthday, with a quote from Turing that's interesting: "We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done". Rewinding the clock to earlier this month, where NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang said that the next-gen GeForce cards were a while away, where he said: "It's a long time from now".

TSMC enters 7nm production, GDDR6 is being spun up into mass production and AMD has nothing at all for Radeon gamers until this time next year. NVIDIA is already ahead of the best AMD offers with the Radeon RX Vega 64 being absolutely dominated by the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti let alone TITAN Xp, so the launch of a new GPU would put them an entire generation and a half ahead, minimum.

TSMC has announced that its exciting 7nm node has entered production, with the company also announcing that it will be investing $25 billion into 5nm node technology.

The company has been talking about and developing 5nm node technology since early 2016, with its eyes on a launch in 2020, and now it is putting its money where its mouth is. Reuters reports: "Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd, a supplier to Apple Inc, said on Thursday it expects to invest $25 billion in 5-nanometer node technology".

Apple should be interested in TSMC's focus on 5nm as they've been using TSMC for chip production for years now. TSMC is also forward-looking to 2022, when we should expect 3nm to pop its head out of the super-small chip production.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, otherwise known as TSMC, has announced that commercial production of 7nm chip has started. TSMC also teased that the newer 5nm node will enter mass production by the end of 2019, or early-2020.

The news comes directly from TSMC boss CC Wei, with DigiTimes reporting: "The ramp-up of 7nm chip output will boost TSMC's overall production capacity to 12 million 12-inch equivalent wafers in 2018, up 9% from 10.5 million units in 2017, Wei indicated, without elaborating on specific orders and customers".

DigiTimes continued: "TSMC will tape out more than 50 chip designs with its 7nm process technology by the end of 2018, Wei said. AI, GPU and cryptocurrency applications take up the majority of the tape-outs, followed by 5G and application processors. TSMC will also start taping out chips built using an enhanced 7nm node with EUV in the second half of 2018, Wei noted. The foundry expects to move the node to risk production in the third quarter".

It looks like NVIDIA might be delaying the launch of its next-gen GeForce GTX 1180, with sources saying a major Taiwanese OEM has returned 300,000 GPU units to NVIDIA... which could delay the new GTX 11 series cards.

SeekingAlpha is reporting that a major OEM that is considered in the "Taiwan Top 3" has returned 300,000 GPUs to NVIDIA. The site reports: "Reports out of Taiwan now suggest that NVIDIA has a gaming GPU inventory problem. 'Semiaccurate' reported on the issue yesterday, and cited excess inventory in the channel as the primary reason for new gaming GPU delay. The glut is so severe that one top Asian OEM partner reportedly returned 300k GPUs to NVIDIA".

Why would there be so many GPUs floating around and then returned? Well, the cryptocurrency mining epidemic would've caused this, and while it was good for a few months business-wise, now it could be biting NVIDIA in the (green) ass.

Acer's new Predator Helios 500 gaming notebook has been somewhat of a mystery with its interesting choice of AMD's larger-than-life Radeon RX Vega 56... but now we have the skinny on what Acer will be doing with it.

We know the Acer Predator Helios 500 can be configured with up to the Intel Core i9-8950HK processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, but it can also be configured with all-AMD components including the new Ryzen 7 2700 processor and Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics.

But we know that the Radeon RX Vega 56 has a 210W TDP in desktop form with a second "power save" BIOS that drops it to 135W, so what the hell (haha, it's HOT down there) will Acer do with the Predator Helios 500 to keep it cool? Well, it looks like the RX Vega 56 inside of the Helios 500 will have its TDP locked to 120W.

We told you the week before Computex 2018 that AMD would show off its next-gen 7nm GPU ready for the new wave of Radeon Instinct accelerators, and now Vega 20 has reportedly been through some benchmarks of Ashes of the Singularity.

The card has turned up with a device ID of "66A0:00", where it will be offering twice the density, twice the power e fficiency, and 35% improved performance over the Vega 10 on the 14nm FinFET node. The benefits of 7nm seem to be huge for Vega so far, but we'll need to see Vega 20 in Radeon RX Vega form before we can pass judgement.

Don't expect that until next year, before Navi arrives as a mid-range part with the purported Radeon RX 680. As for Vega 20, it rocks 32GB of HBM2 and 4096 stream processors into an area smaller than the current Vega 10 GPU. If that's not impressive, I don't know what is.

AMD's latest and greatest graphics card looks to be the new Radeon PRO V340, which is a multi-user computing solution for virtualized environments... you know, so not for gaming.

What makes AMD's new Radeon PRO V340 so special is that it features dual Vega 10 GPUs on 7nm, with a huge 32GB of HBM2 on-board. This seems to be the card that was teased at Computex 2018, and now it is becoming a reality.

The new Radeon PRO V340 features shared hardware encoding for H.265 and H.264 codecs, with something that AMD teases as a "built-in security processor" that we have no idea about just yet. This card is made for design and manufacturing, oil and gas research as well as the media and entertainment industry.

The story of AMD collaborating with Sony on the Navi GPU architeceture for the next-gen PS5 console has really spread throughout the internet like wildfire, but one of the saving graces of AMD's future with Radeon against GeForce was MCM, or multi-chip modules.

But according to a new interview between PCGamesN and RTG's new SVP of Engineering, David Wang, we could be waiting a while. Wang said AMD is "looking at the MCM type of approach, but we've yet to conclude that this is something that can be used for traditional gaming graphics type of application". So no MCM for Navi, makes sense.

This is not surprising at all, as Navi has seen two-thirds of RTG engineers working with Sony, while AMD plans its next-gen GCN architecture for post-Navi. No MCM for Navi, at least in its first-gen iteration, makes total sense. It's a departure to ex-RTG boss Raja Koduri, who wanted to take full advantage of the Infinity Fabric interconnect to throw copious amounts of GPUs onto a single ASIC design.

We are so close to the launch of NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce GTX 11 series graphics cards I can almost smell the PCB, especially with the fresh rumors popping up today about a "new video output" on the new cards.

The new rumors come from Igor Wallosek who has talked with NVIDIA's AIB partners R&D teams, who said: "You can already look forward to a new way of a very specific video output and NV has also fundamentally changed the tact and its handling". This is an interesting rumor, and something that has weight to it.

NVIDIA's update to the video output makes sense if they are going to offer HDMI 2.1 that will usher in 4K 120Hz HDR support... perfect for those Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGDs) that NVIDIA has coming out in the coming months.

It was only yesterday that I wrote about Sony co-developing the Navi GPU architecture with AMD for its upcoming next-gen PS5 console, but what about the Navi GPU itself for the Radeon graphics market?

Well, the Radeon RX 680 according to my sources will be powered by the Navi GPU architecture and feature 8GB of GDDR6 memory, with the performance of the GTX 1080 to GTX 1080 Ti or so. We should expect a price of somewhere in the $299-$399 range, and will battle the GTX 1080 Ti at higher resolution games because of its faster GDDR6 RAM.

I talked to some industry sources over the last few months, and then some new ones at Computex 2018 that told me Navi wouldn't be here until at least half way through 2018. Another source said that it would not be that great, in the way that it will not be a successor to Radeon RX Vega at first, but rather the Radeon RX 680 powered by Navi 10.

The last time we heard about Intel's dedicated GPU is that it would be unveiled at CES 2019, but according to new information from Intel itself, their dedicated GPU won't be arriving until 2020. Still doesn't mean we won't hear about it at CES 2019, but now we know for a fact it'll be here in 2020.

Intel took to its Twitter to tease that its "first discrete GPU coming in 2020" with a picture of Raja Koduri, who left Radeon Technologies Group last year and joined Intel on their adventures into the GPU world. This is also coming from the company that promised us 10nm years ago, and is having multiple issues with the node process... so, take it with a grain of salt. That is, if we forget the Intel i740 which was one of the first AGP graphics cards back in the 90s against the sea of PCI-based graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA.

The company has been tapping AMD Radeon GPU designs for its latest processors, so I wonder where the AMD relationship ends with Radeon and Intel when it starts launching its own discrete GPUs. The current codenames for Intel's upcoming GPUs are Arctic Sound and Jupiter Sound, with Raja Koduri focusing on the datacenter and AI at first, but we should expect gaming variants to arrive in the months and years after the initial push from Intel for GPU dominance.

It was back in February that I wrote that NVIDIA could charge up to $1499 for its next-gen GeForce GTX 1180 graphics card (which at the time I called the GTX 2080 like everyone else did) because of the graphics card shortage during that massive crypto mining global craziness.

Well, I spoke with many of the AIB partners at Computex 2018 about the next-gen GeForce and they all told me that we have an August/September release window corrobrating my world exclusive during Computex that NVIDIA would announce the GTX 1180 on July 30. We could see the Founders Edition released at first, just like the GTX 1070/1080 in 2016, with custom cards in the months following.

But then we come down to the price. Everything that I've heard about the next card is that it will be:

Computex 2018 - AMD is kicking all sorts of ass today with the announcements of its second-gen Threadripper CPUs rocking a huge 32C/64T of CPU power, the super-small Radeon RX Vega 56 Nano, and also the world's first GPU on 7nm - just like we said they would, last week.

AMD will have Vega on 7nm inside of the upcoming new Radeon Instinct part, which thanks to 7nm will feature 35% more performance over the previous-gen 14nm part, with twice the power efficiency that means it can do it all with under half the power consumption. Crazy stuff.

The density has been increased by 2x which means we can have smaller die sizes, or what I want - bigger GPUs. Bring it on, AMD. This now means AMD is ahead of the GPU game in one area, as even Volta is only on 12nm. It's good to see Team Red in their stride, and I can't wait to see what 7nm Radeon RX gaming cards can do.

Computex 2018 - I disappointed so many people with my report that NVIDIA would unveil their next-gen GeForce GTX 1180 graphics cards during GTC 2018, and admit failure. I'll give each and every one of you a cuddle when I see you for the disappointment.

But walking across the floor of Nangang and talking to various industry people, NVIDIA will be launching their next-gen GeForce GTX 1180 graphic card on July 30. NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang said they were a while away during NVIDIA's Computex 2018 press conference, but of course he's going to say that.

July 30 isn't too far away, and while we were wrong about the GTC 2018 launch, my sources were very clear about July 30. I asked multiple people and more than one confirmed it was less than two months away, with July 30 specifically being mentioned by multiple of my sources.

Computex 2018 - COLORFUL has had its GeForce GTX 1080 Ti KUDAN on the market for a while now, but we got a closer look at it once again at Computex 2018.

COLORFUL uses a hybrid cooler with a triple-fan design that will cool it out of the box without using the included waterblock if you want radically reduced temperatures and higher overclocks. GPU clock wise we have a base GPU clock of 1480MHz and boost of 1582MHz, while the 'One Key OC' button on the back of the card cranks those clocks up to 1657/1784MHz.

The usual 11GB of GDDR5X is clocked at 11Gbps, but there will be some OC wiggle room of course.