AMD Radeon VII

A promising first taste of 7nm, but not a revolution.

- Jarred Walton

RADEON VII IS THE FIRST GPU to be manufactured using 7nm lithography. On the face of it, that’s a big jump from the previous 14nm technology. But the numbers used for a manufacturing process often contain a fair amount of marketing. In the Radeon VII’s case, it’s good progress, but it’s not a transformation. And it’s not enough to push the Radeon VII ahead of the competition, especially at a steep $700.

AMD doubled the number of HBM2 memory stacks, so you get 16GB and a whopping 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU core is much the same as the Vega 64, and with fewer GPU cores (3,840 compared to 4,096) and just a 200MHz improvement in clock speed, in theory it’s only 6 percent more computational performance. However, AMD increased the number of integer and floating-point accumulators, and while it says these will help with compute performance, they could help in games as well.