Think of it as the Radeon RX 580 / 480 replacement. It will be small, and is likely to perform as well as the Vega 14nm that shipped last year. In the Nvidia performance world Navi should perform close to Geforce GTX 1080 which is quite good for the mainstream part but probably on part of the mainstream part planned after the high end part.

Fudzilla has already reported that Vega 7nm is not a Gaming GPU. This might cause some confusion as there are two different abbreviations floating around. GPU as in General Purpose Unit, or GPU as a graphics processing unit. What we meant by saying Vega 7nm is not a GPU, we want to make crystal clear that Vega 7nm will not be a gaming part.

Navi 7nm won’t have two different SKUs, one that miraculously goes after the Geforce Turing edition planned for later this year. So, the long story short, AMD won’t have anything in the high-end space faster than Vega between now and end of 2019. In GPU world this is eternity. This is the product where Radeon Technology Group really spent some time to go after this highly competitive and profitable mainstream / performance market. Of course, AMD did sell every single RX 580 / 570 cards as well as every single Vega 56 and 64 manufactured to miners, as these guys were buying anything to get their hands on it, but with the current situation on the market, one can only hope that there will be a mining demand in mid 2019. 

Radeon RX 580 / 570 definitely needs an update as this Polaris based architecture was simply a slight improvement over the Radeon RX 480 generation based on GCN 4 and Polaris core. The new Navi 7nm mainstream chip would bring much needed advanced to stay competitive and add some Ray Tracing acceleration elements in the chip too.

The earliest we would expect a Navi successor, a real high end chip, would be at some point in 2020. This is great news for Jeff Fishers team, the head of all Geforce gaming stuff at Nvidia but a sad day for the competition.

Our biggest fear is that Jensen will push the prices of already ridiculous overpriced high-end GPU even further. The David Wang / Mike Rayfield combo is definitely working hard to make  adjustments to the roadmaps, but these things take years. Let’s hope it will not be too late.