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Vega µarch
General Info
Arch Type	GPU
Designer	AMD
Manufacturer	GlobalFoundries
Introduction	2017
Process	12 nm
Succession
Polaris Navi

Vega (also known as Graphics core next 5th generation) is both a microarchitecture and GPU family developed by AMD as a successor to the GCN4 microarchitecture and the arctic islands family.

Codenames

Codename	Description
Raven Ridge	Mobile processors based on Zen CPUs and a Vega GPU

Models

Vega IGP Models			Standards
Name	Compute Units	Shaders	Vulkan		Direct3D			OpenGL		OpenCL
			Windows	Linux	Windows	Linux	HLSL	Windows	Linux	Windows	Linux
Vega 8	8	512	1.1		12	N/A	-	4.6	4.6	2.2
Vega 10	10	640
Vega 11	11	704

Vega Dedicated Models			Standards
Name	Compute Units	Shaders	Vulkan		Direct3D			OpenGL		OpenCL
			Windows	Linux	Windows	Linux	HLSL	Windows	Linux	Windows	Linux
Vega 56	56	3584	1.1		12	N/A	-	4.6	4.6	2.2
Vega 64	64	4096

Performance

The original target of the RX Vega series was to compete with Nvidia's latest Pascal architecture. RX Vega 64 -> GTX 1080 RX Vega 56 -> GTX 1070

The performance is generally good, but when it comes to performance per watt, or PPW, Vega is outperformed by Pascal.

Hardware Accelerated Video

[Edit] Zen with Radeon Vega Hardware Accelerated Video Capabilities
Codec	Encode			Decode
Max FPS	@1080p	@1440p	@2160p	@1080p 4:2:0	@2160p 4:2:0
MPEG-2 (H.262)				60 FPS	N/A
VC-1
VP9 8bpc				240 FPS	60 FPS
VP9 10bpc
MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) 8bpc	120 FPS	60 FPS	30 FPS
MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) 10bpc
HEVC (H.265) 8bpc	120 FPS	60 FPS	30 FPS
HEVC (H.265) 10bpc
JPEG/MJPEG 8bpc

Process Technology

See also: 14 nm process

Vega is manufactured on GlobalFoundries' 14 nm process.

Architecture

Preliminary Data! Information presented in this article deal with future products, data, features, and specifications that have yet to be finalized, announced, or released. Information may be incomplete and can change by final release.

Key changes from Arctic Islands

• New programmable geometry pipeline
  • Up to 2x throughput
  • Primitive shaders
  • Improved workload balancing
• Tile based rendering
• New low precision instructions
  • Half precision floating point with 2x performance
  • 8 bit integer with 4x performance
• 15% higher clock speeds
• HBM 2
  • 2x bandwidth
  • 4x memory capacity
• New memory controller
• Render back-end is now a client of the L2 cache
• The instruction buffer has been enlarged

HBM 2

Vega makes use of 2 stacks of HBM 2 (High bandwidth memory).

single stack	HBM 1	HBM 2
dies	4 + 1 4 dram die, 1 control die	2-8 + 1 2,4 or 8 dram die, 1 control die
Gb/die	2Gb	8Gb
total Gb	8Gb	16-64Gb
bus width	1024	1024
clock speed	500 MHz	945 MHz
bandwidth	128 GB/s	238 GB/s

References

• AMD 2017 Financial Analyst Day, May 16, 2017

Documents

• White Paper: Radeon’s next-generation Vega architecture

See Also

• list of microarchitectures
• gen9
• Raven Ridge