Published in Graphics

Volta expected to outperform AMD's Radeon RX Vega

by on07 March 2017


But will it be too late?

Rumours are starting to come in that Nvidia’s coming Volta will give AMD's Radeon RX Vega a good kicking thanks to Taiwan Semiconductor’s 12 nm fabrication process over Vega's 14 nm.

Vega had been touted to be a key threat to Nvidia, and its newly announced GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

After years of not having competition, Vega has forced Nvidia to get off its backside and come up with something that can at least match it.

Not much information has been known or leaked about the Pascal successor, other than the fact that it will be working with TSMC particularly in the manufacturing of the upcoming Volta GPUs.

It appears that Volta might be a die shrink, which could give it performance gains. Global Foundries has proven this in its 12nm process achieving 15 percent improvements in performance while consuming 50 percent less power than the 16nm process.

The rumours are that Nvidia will use TSMC's updated 16nm design to solidly outperform Vega's own improvements in performance and power from a shrunken fabrication process

It will use GDDR6 memory or the HBM2 just like Vega to deliver speeds of 16Gbps from the 10Gbps in the GTX 1080's GDDRX5.

Volta is not expected to appear until 2018 which means Nvidia will still be trying to milk its somewhat dull Pascal architecture for a while longer. We expect Volta to appear in the GTX 30 series, the GTX 3080 and 3080 Ti in the high-end of the market with the 3070 in the mid-range.

The GTX 20 series will be Pascal refresh GPUs to be launched within this year.  The question is will all this be too little and too late.

Last modified on 07 March 2017
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