AMD Targets Machine Learning With New Radeon Vega Frontier & Optimized Software

These new Vega GPUs look like they have sufficient performance to be in the same ballpark as's highly acclaimed family of PASCAL GPUs. Taken together with the optimized ROCm ML software AMD has developed, they form a solid first step for market entry. But it will all come down to the ROCm open source software to transform the hardware's potential performance into real value. AMD announced the Radeon Instinct MI6, MI8, and the Vega-based MI25 for Machine Learning back in December, with Vega shipments expected mid-2017. Vega is being positioned for compute-intensive training jobs against the NVIDIA Pascal-based Tesla P100 with what looks like competitive performance potential.