AMD has kept its silence regarding the status of its upcoming line of graphics cards codenamed Vega. Recently, AMD announced a key detail regarding its Vega GPUs confirming that the company is aiming to launch the series within the first six months of 2017.
AMD chief technology officer Mark Papermaster confirmed that the first models of the Vega graphics cards will be released at the high-end enthusiasts-grade PC market. Papermaster confirmed this release timeline at the 2016 Deutsche Dank Technology Conference on Tuesday in Las Vegas, according to Digital Trends.
At the conference, Papermaster said that Vega GPUs will have significant improvements in terms of power efficiency and performance compared to the current AMD Polaris lineup. Vega graphics cards are aimed for hardcore gaming, virtual reality and augmented reality applications, as well as desktop applications that require high-performance GPUs like video rendering.
It was originally speculated that the first batch of AMD Vega graphics cards will be released late this year. However, a leaked presentation slide from AMD revealed the company's roadmap which showed Vega's release date to be sometime in the first half of next year.
AMD said that Vega graphics cards are designed to work efficiently with the company's upcoming line of Zen CPUs. With Zen, AMD is hoping to regain the market share it had lost to its biggest competitor, Intel.
AMD Vega graphics cards will feature next-gen High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) which is a stacked memory type which has a theoretical throughput of up to 256GBps depending on its configuration. AMD is perhaps one of the pioneers of HBM technology. The company first introduced HBM technology on its Radeon Fury X graphics card.
AMD is still fighting an uphill battle with Nvidia in the graphics card market. Nvidia's current flagship cards are based on the company's new Pascal architecture, and AMD aims to compete with this series of graphics cards with its own Vega GPUs, according to PC World.
