AMD’s Navi architecture will reportedly sport AI specific circuits

At this time it is unknown what this new circuitry could do, be it add additional ISA capabilities for AI calculations or add a whole new acceleration engine to the product which will act in a similar way to the Nvidia Tensor Cores that are present in their Volta V100 GPU. 

With Navi being based on Globalfoundries’ 7nm manufacturing process the earliest release date for the product will be in the second half of 2018, though this could easily be delayed if 7nm suffers from any major setbacks or AMD has difficulty producing products on the process node. 

 

  

AMD’s product roadmaps say that Vega is designed to use Next Generation memory and feature “scalability”, though at this time it is unknown what exactly these features mean. 

On AMD’s lower-end product stack it is likely that AMD is planning to use GDDR6 memory, though at this time it is anyone’s guess what the Radeon team has in store for us.

Scalability is another interesting piece of information, given Vega’s use of AMD’s Infinity Fabric tech. Is AMD planning on making Navi with multi-chip GPUs in mind? Could AMD create a Threadripper/EPYC style GPU with multiple smaller units? 

Without any official information on Navi, it impossible to guess how it will perform and what unique features it will have. 

 

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