AMD reveals their 7nm Vega Instinct MI60 and MI50 graphics cards

AMD has officially revealed their 7nm Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50 graphics cards, the world’s first 7nm graphics cards. Both of these GPUs are based on AMD’s Vega architecture, though it is clear that AMD has made some additional changes under the hood to offer increased performance levels in select workloads. 

For starters, AMD has worked to deliver the industry’s highest levels of FP64 compute on a single graphics card, reaching 7.4 TFLOPS on their MI60 graphics card, something that is unmatched within the industry, surpassing even Nvidia’s Turing-based Quadro RTX 8000. On top of that, AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 graphics cards also offer support for PCIe 4.0, a first for the Datacenter GPU market. 

Thanks to AMD’s use of TSMC’s 7nm process node, the company has been able to condense their Vega GPU design to a die size of 331mm squared, while also adding two additional memory controllers to support four HBM2 dies. This allows the Radeon Instinct 60 to support up to 32GB of HBM2 memory.   

In terms of core clock speeds, 7nm Vega offers a significant boost over AMD’s 14nm design, boosting the graphic’s card’s peak clock speeds from 1500MHz in the MI25 to 1800MHz on the MI60, an increase of 20%. This showcases the performance benefits of TSMC’s 7nm process node, especially after considering the fact that the MI60 has the same 300W TDP as the MI25, while also requiring 8-pin + 6-pin power configuration. 

AMD has made it clear that their 7nm Vega graphics cards are not designed for gaming applications, instead, acting as a way for the company to enter the lucrative server/datecenter and machine learning markets.