AMD revealed the world’s first 7nm GPU yesterday evening during its Next Horizon event in San Francisco. The AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 graphics accelerator utilises a 7nm Vega 20 GPU, the first of its kind.
While the Vega 20 GPU is aimed squarely at high-performance computing (HPC) usage, for now, it does provide us with a tantalizing preview of where we’re headed next with our gaming graphics cards.
The AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 sports a 7nm Vega 20 GPU. It features 13.23 billion transistors crammed onto a 331mm2 die. The Vega 20 GPU has 64 Compute Units and 4096 Stream Processors, capable of 7.4 TFLOPs double precision compute, 14.8 TFLOPs single precision, and 29.5 TFLOPs half precision compute. In comparison to the 14nm parts we’re looking at 25% performance gains within the same power envelope, or 50% less power usage when running at 14nm clock speeds.
Specs-wise, the 7nm Vega 20 is actually pretty much the same as the current 14nm Vega 10, but the smaller process node allows for higher clock speeds and lower power draw. At 331mm2 it’s also tiny, coming in at just 68% the size of the 484mm2 Vega 10 GPU.
The Vega 20 GPU is paired with 32GB HBM2 memory on the Radeon Instinct MI60, offering up a mightily impressive 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. This is more than any other commercially available GPU on the market. It’s also an industry-first GPU capable of using PCIe 4.0, affording it 64GB/s bi-direction CPU-to-GPU bandwidth.
AMD has promised the Radeon Instinct MI60 will be ready to launch by the end of the year. Unfortunately, it’s literally just for enterprise use right now but we do begin to get a picture of where AMD is headed with its 7nm products.