AMD Vega ‘New Frontier’ Announcement With Raja Koduri Coming Today

There is an immense amount of excitement building around AMD's next generation Vega GPU architecture, both from outside observers like us and from within. As to the latter, AMD's senior vice president and chief architect of its Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri, and the division's senior marketing director, Chris Hook, both teased a Vega announcement on Twitter that is expected later today.

Starting with the head honcho, here is what Koduri threw out to the social media space:
And here's what Hook had to say:
It is moments like this that make us glad we paid attention in history class. Koduri's incomplete quote is one that was famously uttered by John F. Kennedy nearly 60 years ago when delivering his Democratic National Convention nomination acceptance address. In that speech, he talked of standing "on the edge of a new frontier."

Switching over to Hook's Twitter post, Davy Crockett is known as the "king of the wild frontier," as Tennessee Ernie Ford made famous in The Ballad of Davy Crockett. And to solve the second part of Hook's riddle, there is an airline named Frontier.

So there we have the buzzword that Koduri and Hook are throwing around, and an appropriate one at that. Indeed, AMD is standing on the cusp of a new frontier with its Vega architecture, which is expected to make the company competitive again in the high-end graphics market. As it stands, the enthusiast sector is the sole domain of NVIDIA with its GeForce GTX 1070, GeForce GTX 1080, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, and Titan Xp graphics cards.

That is about to change. AMD is holding a financial analyst call later today and part of the itinerary includes a "Radeon Technologies Group overview and update" by Koduri. We're not sure what exactly he will announce, though if we had to guess, it could be confirmation of the rumor that Vega will launch at Computex in a couple of weeks.


Whatever the announcement is, expectations are high for Vega. This is precisely why AMD formed a dedicated Radeon Technologies Group two years ago with Koduri chosen as the capable architect to see this thing through.

"With the creation of the Radeon Technologies Group we are putting in place a more agile, vertically-integrated graphics organization focused on solidifying our position as the graphics industry leader, recapturing profitable share across traditional graphics markets, and staking leadership positions in new markets such as virtual and augmented reality," AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said at the time.

Polaris was a good start for AMD, but Vega is the GPU architecture that we've been waiting for. Rumor has it AMD will launch three Vega cards on June 5th starting $400. Hopefully we'll have some clarity on that by the end of today.