When Google announced its own ambitions for game streaming and development of the Stadia service, many questions have arisen about the hardware that the search giant is going to use in its new cloud platform. The fact is that Google itself gave an extremely vague description of the hardware configuration, especially its graphic part: in fact, it was only promised that systems broadcasting games to users of the service would be assembled on some custom AMD graphics accelerators with HMB2 memory, 56 computing units (CU) and a performance of 10,7 teraflops. Based on this description, many have made , that we are talking about 7-nm AMD Vega graphics processors, which have found application in consumer Radeon VII video cards. But new information indicates that Stadia will use first-generation Vega GPUs like the Vega 56.
To assert that we are talking about Vega is the first generation, allow the data that appeared on the website of Khronos, an organization that develops and develops the Vulkan graphical interface. As stated there, "Google Games Platform Gen 1", that is, the hardware platform in the first generation Stadia service, will be compatible with Vulkan_1_1 through the use of the AMD GCN 1.5 architecture (fifth generation of GCN). And this means that the GPUs used in this case are architecturally consistent with the first Vega video cards based on 14nm chips, while the later Vega processors, produced using the 7nm process technology and used in Radeon VII video cards, refer to an advanced architecture. GCN 1.5.1 (generation 5.1).
In other words, it looks like AMD is preparing nothing more than a special version of Vega 56 for Google. The Stadia announcement said that graphics accelerators for the service will receive 56 CU, 10,7 teraflops of performance and HBM2 memory with bandwidth 484 GB/s. In addition, it was also said that the total amount of system memory (RAM and video memory in total) will be 16 GB. This can be interpreted in such a way that the accelerator for Stadia is just a specialized version of Vega 56 with 8 GB HMB2 and increased core and video memory frequencies.
It turns out that AMD still did not dare to offer Google to use 7nm Vega chips. And this is quite easy to explain: mature and time-tested solutions in the context of large-scale supply contracts are a more reliable solution. In addition, by offering Stadia a mature 14nm version of Vega, AMD will be able to extract higher revenue at this stage and insulate itself from potential problems. The production of 14nm Vega chips is well established and takes place at the facilities of GlobalFoundries, while orders for the manufacture of 7nm chips would have to be placed with TSMC, which can create certain problems both with the level of yield of suitable chips and with production volumes.
At the same time, there is no doubt that the Google Stadia platform will evolve, and GPUs released using 7nm technology will obviously come to it sooner or later. However, most likely these will no longer be Vega chips, but more progressive accelerators with the Navi architecture, which AMD is going to introduce starting from the third quarter.
Google Stadia is expected to launch in 2019 and will allow subscribers to stream games to their devices in 4K resolution at 60Hz.
Source: 3dnews.ru