While we’ve had lots of juicy news from AMD regarding monster Ryzen processors and gaming laptops at Computex, the only disappointing sniff of information on the next-gen Vega graphics card front is that the consumer models won’t be out for quite some time yet (contrary to previous rumors that we’d see a Vega launch at Computex).
In fact, AMD said that the hotly anticipated Radeon RX Vega GPUs destined for mainstream PCs won’t be launched until SIGGRAPH 2017, which takes place in Los Angeles, kicking off on July 30.
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So, the earliest we’ll see these graphics cards is the very end of July, and that might just be an initial reveal of the hardware, as opposed to an actual launch – the RX Vega cards may not hit the shelves until several weeks after. So these GPUs might not be on sale until mid-August, or possibly even later.
Fingers crossed that the reveal and actual launch of the Vega cards happens simultaneously, or at least with a very small gap.
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New Frontier
The first card featuring the next-gen graphics architecture (which follows on from Polaris) will actually be the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition (pictured), and AMD said that’s expected to go on sale come June 27.
However, this is an expensive GPU targeted at professional users, not consumers, and intended to be used for the likes of machine learning, AI applications, heavyweight video editing or rendering and so forth.
It’ll still be interesting to see how it stacks up against Nvidia’s rival Quadro offerings, though, and that could give us a hint of how RX Vega will shape up in the battle with the competition.
Meanwhile, over at Computex, AMD has also been busy discussing its plans for Ryzen mobile APUs to bring powerful performance to ultra-portable notebooks – not to mention showing off a new Ryzen-powered beast of a gaming laptop from Asus.
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