Nvidia is not used to competition and has been jacking up prices lately for somewhat disappointing chips, but AMD is saying that it thinks its new offerings can force Nvidia to pull its finger out.
At the AMD Tech Summit in Beijing last weekend, AMD vice president Scott Herkelman took the stage to discuss the upcoming Vega-powered graphics cards. He didn’t give anyone a release date but said that AMD’s plans were to create a bit of competition in the notebook GPU market.
AMD plans to decrease the overall footprint of the upcoming mobile GPUs by stacking VRAM dies and freeing up more internal space without sacrificing performance. Size is an important consideration for notebook manufacturers, but this announcement was light on details.
Sadly it was not clear if he was talking about rolling out Vega to discrete mobile or if it will be included in AMD’s “APUs” — a CPU/GPU combo that delivers a smaller overall footprint but a lot less graphical performance.
Herkelman said Vega-powered mobile chips will provide notebook manufacturers with the horsepower they’ll need for their products to drive virtual reality and “the latest and greatest AAA games”. This hints at discrete GPUs powered by the new Vega architecture.
AMD’s previous architecture, code-named “Fiji,” never made much impact in the notebook market, in part due to its power demands. However this could not have been the only reason. Nvidia did well bringing its 10-series GPUs to notebooks despite causing the city lights to dim when anyone plugged it in.
AMD’s Vega-powered GPUs will be available in 4GB and 8GB options, on account of the way the new chips will stack memory. Herkelman told Beijing throngs that Vega-powered chips were “just around the corner”.
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AMD expects Vega to give Nvidia a good kicking in the notebooks
Smaller footprints
In a move which will get the Nvidia fanboys jolly cross, AMD has said that its new Vega line-up will actually compete with their favourite chip maker in the notebook market.