AMD roadmap confirms Vega for June, Ryzen Threadripper this summer
At its presentation to financial analysts today, AMD presented an outline of upcoming product rollouts, and it highlighted all the buzzy stuff to impress Wall Street.
The first Vega-based Radeon card, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, will be available in late June. But probably not for you.
I'll spare you the presentation about datacenter technology (though its EPYC server architecture sounds pretty impressive), but AMD's financial analyst conference revealed availability news about several forthcoming products that you probably should care about.
Rumors about Vega, AMD's most recent graphics processing architecture to follow Polaris, which powers its current cards, have been circulating recently and today the company confirmed that the first board incorporating it will ship in late June. It's the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, and unless you're a data scientist, "immersion" engineer (working with mixed reality) or high-profile product designer, you probably won't be getting your paws on one. Sadly, there were no details about what's actually on the board, but AMD said it would be providing more details over the next few weeks, hopefully about less stratospheric cards.
The company also confirmed that the Ryzen Threadripper, its 16-core, 32-thread high-end processor will be out this summer. Once again, no details, but AMD will have more information for the world at Computex next week.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the mobile version of its Ryzen processor for 2-in-1s, ultrabooks and gaming laptops will hit in the second half of this year. It's the company's first APU (accelerated processing unit) based on its Zen architecture and incorporates Vega-based graphics processing on-die.
A low-end Ryzen 3, which joins the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 but targeting even cheaper systems was also confirmed for the third quarter of this year. And a workstation-optimized Ryzen Pro, with more commercial security and management hooks, is also slated for the second half of 2017, with the Pro mobile version hitting in the first quarter of 2018.
I recently speculated that Apple had fallen almost irretrievably behind in the workstation market, but it's also a traditional AMD partner. If it builds a sensibly designed Mac Pro with a Ryzen Pro and a workstation-class Vega card? That might go a long way to closing the gap, especially if AMD's new architectures perform as advertised against its Intel and Nvidia competition. But only if the CPU and GPU ship closer to September than December.