Quote:Linux publication Phoronix spotted a few patches to the AMDGPU Linux graphics driver that are related to AMD's next-generation Arcturus graphics cards.

When AMD announced its latest Radeon DNA (RDNA) graphics card architecture at Computex 2019, the chipmaker made it very clear that it would co-exist along with the existing Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The general consensus is that AMD would probably base its future gaming products around the RDNA architecture while relegating the GCN architecture exclusively to its workstation products. Therefore, Arcturus, not Navi, was Vega's successor all along.

Current AMD professional-grade offerings, such as the Radeon Pro Vega II, Radeon Instinct MI60 and Radeon Instinct MI50 employ the Vega 20 silicon, which TSMC produces for AMD on the 7nm manufacturing process. There's a high possibility that Arcturus will probably use a variation of the Vega silicon, and there is some evidence to support the rumor.
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AMD could announce Arcturus at SIGGRAPH 2019 in July or Hot Chips in August. Either convention would be a great place to reveal an enterprise graphics card. As hinted in the AMD PowerPoint slide, Arcturus could launch next year.

Quote:This rumor suggests that Arcturus is a Vega-derived GPU, though it seems as though it might use the Vega refinements also coming down the pipe for the Radeon Mobile 4000 series. I’ll get into why after we talk about the specs. The leak, by @Komachi_Ensaka, indicates a 32GB HBM card (same maximum RAM loadout as the current Instinct family), with up to 8192 GPU cores, a boost clock of 1.33GHz, and a base clock of 1GHz.
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It’s unlikely we’d ever see Arcturus come to the consumer market. AMD’s Big Navi is expected to answer the needs of those customers, while a card like this will be reserved for data centers or HPC.

Quote:AMD's upcoming large post-Navi graphics chip, codenamed "Arcturus," will debut as "Radeon Instinct MI100", which is an AI-ML accelerator under the Radeon Instinct brand, which AMD calls "Server Accelerators." TechPowerUp accessed its BIOS, which is now up on our VGA BIOS database. The card goes with the device ID "0x1002 0x738C," which confirms "AMD" and "Arcturus,". The BIOS also confirms that memory size is at a massive 32 GB HBM2, clocked at 1000 MHz real (possibly 1 TB/s bandwidth, if memory bus width is 4096-bit).
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Arcturus' debut as a Radeon Instinct product follows the pattern of AMD debuting new big GPUs as low-volume/high-margin AI-ML accelerators first, followed by Radeon Pro and finally Radeon client graphics products. Arcturus is not "big Navi," rather it seems to be much closer to Vega than to Navi, which makes perfect sense given its target market. AMD's Linux sources mention "It's because Arcturus has not 3D engine", which could hint at what AMD did with this chip: take Vega and remove all 3D raster graphics ability, which shaves a few billion transistors off the silicon, freeing up space for more CUs.

Quote:AMD is preparing to launch its next-generation of Radeon Instinct GPUs based on the new CDNA architecture designed for enterprise deployments. Thanks to the popular hardware leaker _rogame (@_rogame) we have some information about the configuration of the upcoming Radeon Instinct MI100 "Arcturus" server GPU. Previously, we obtained the BIOS of the Arcturus GPU that showed a configuration of 128 Compute Units (CUs), which resulted in 8,192 of CDNA cores. That configuration had a specific setup of 1334 MHz GPU clock, SoC frequency of 1091 MHz, and memory speed of 1000 MHz. However, there was another GPU test board spotted which featured a bit different specification.

The reported configuration is an Arcturus GPU with 120 CUs, resulting in a CDNA core count of 7,680 cores. These cores are running at frequencies of 878 MHz for the core clock, 750 MHz SoC clock, and a surprising 1200 MHz memory clock. While the SoC and core clocks are lower than the previous report, along with the CU count, the memory clock is up by 200 MHz. It is important to note that this is just a test board/variation of the MI100, and actual frequencies should be different.