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Rumour has it that AMD might bump up the release of its ‘Vega' architecture graphics card. Just last month, AMD updated its GPU roadmap, showing Polaris launching this Summer and Vega coming in 2017 but following on from Nvidia's recent Pascal launch, some believe that AMD may now launch Vega in October this year. While this rumour has caught on with multiple sites reporting it, you probably shouldn't get too excited about this idea yet.
Vega is set to be the first of AMD's graphics cards to make use of HBM 2 and will apparently be a high-end card, while Polaris is targeting the ‘mainstream' GPU market this year.
Word that AMD might be planning to bring forward its Vega release date comes from a 3DCenter report, which is in-turn based on a comment from a forum poster. It is really shaky ground and highly speculative as there is no legitimate source.
I did some digging around and I managed to scrounge up two other instances of Vega being mentioned recently, the first was in a SemiAccurate comment thread, in which one user claims that the GPU is already being shown to some behind closed doors but doesn't specify who exactly. The second is in the patch notes for AIDA64, which was recently updated with preliminary GPU information for AMD Vega 10 (Greenland). Neither of these additional sources really do much to back up the rumour.
If Polaris is indeed targeting the ‘mainstream' GPU market, then it would make sense for AMD to bring out something this year to tackle the GTX 1080 in the enthusiast market. However, it is worth considering that there are other factors in play, like the availability of manufacturers and HBM2 chips that would impact AMD's plans to bring out a Vega graphics card this year.
KitGuru Says: If AMD could bring out a powerful Vega GPU this year then that would be great to see but this rumour sits on top of super shaky, practically non-existent ground, so don't get too excited about the idea until something more concrete comes along.
