AMD 7nm Vega May Never make it to Gaming GPUs

There’s been a lot of hype around the AMD 7nm Vega ever since the company announced it in early January. The new piece of tech is expected to offer decent performance upgrades over the current-gen Radeon cards. But, this may be of no use to gamers. A new report suggests that the 7nm Vega GPU will target the professional/AI market and never hit our mainstream desktops.

Next-Gen 7nm Vega Planned Only for Pros and Not Gamers: Report

During their Tech day at CES 2018, AMD CEO Lis Su confirmed that Vega would represent the company’s first 7nm silicon. She further revealed that it will be a machine learning product that will appear in the form of Radeon Instinct family later this year.

Now as was the case with the 14nm Vega, it was naturally assumed that the follow-up graphics core would first hit the professional market and then trickle down to the gaming space. A report from Fudzilla, however, states otherwise, claiming the AMD 7nm Vega isn’t being planned for as a consumer GPU.

This is based on the reasoning that a 7nm chip featuring HBM would be very expensive for your typical graphics card, even more than the Radeon RX Vega 64 and Vega 56 cards when they launched. Which means it wouldn’t be competitive against the next generation Nvidia Ampere or Turing GPU rumored to launch sometime in Q3.

If the report turns out to be true, then we’ll probably have to wait for the AMD Navi architecture to power the next high-end Radeon cards for our gaming rigs. Navi will be the big product on 7nm that will certainly launch in 2019, though we don’t know the exact timeframe.

AMD hasn’t yet commented on the report. Moreover, the source of this info—Fudzilla—isn’t always spot on with its rumors, so I would advise you to take this with a heavy pinch of salt. What do you think of this report? Let us know your thoughts down below in the comments.