AMD Radeon VII: A 7nm-long step in the right direction, but is that enough?
The AMD Radeon VII, which shipped to members of the press with a stand of sorts.
| Specs at a glance: AMD Radeon VII | |
|---|---|
| STREAM PROCESSORS | 3,840 |
| TEXTURE UNITS | 240 |
| ROPS | 64 |
| CORE CLOCK | 1,400MHz |
| BOOST CLOCK | 1,800MHz |
| MEMORY BUS WIDTH | 4,096-bit |
| MEMORY BANDWIDTH | 1,024GB/s |
| MEMORY SIZE | 16GB HBM2 |
| Outputs | 3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b |
| Release date | February 7, 2019 |
| PRICE | $699 directly from AMD |
In the world of computer graphics cards, AMD has been behind its only rival, Nvidia, for as long as we can remember. But a confluence of recent events finally left AMD with a sizable opportunity in the market.
Having established a serious lead with its 2016 and 2017 GTX graphics cards, Nvidia tried something completely different last year. Its RTX line of cards essentially arrived with near-equivalent power as its prior generation for the same price (along with a new, staggering $1,200 card in its "consumer" line). The catch was that these cards' new, proprietary cores were supposed to enable a few killer perks in higher-end graphics rendering. But that big bet faltered, largely because only one truly RTX-compatible retail game currently exists, and Nvidia took the unusual step of warning investors about this fact.
Meanwhile, AMD finally pulled off a holy-grail number for its graphics cards: 7nm. As in, a tiny fabrication process that packs even more components onto a GPU's silicon for other hardware and features (the Radeon VII's HBM2 RAM shares die space with the GPU). In the case of this week's AMD Radeon VII-which goes on sale today, February 7, for $699-that extra space is dedicated to a whopping 16GB VRAM, well above the 11GB maximum of any consumer-grade Nvidia product. AMD also insists that its memory bandwidth has been streamlined to make that VII-specific perk valuable for any 3D application.
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