Oh AMD, why do you have to give your products the same names as your internal codenames for entirely different products? It makes it so confusing for the rest of us and we here at Megagames have to write pieces breaking down the differences.
For those of you reading this who aren't AMD, we are talking about Vega 20. Or rather, Radeon Pro Vega 20, AMD's new mobile gaming graphics chip which is decently powerful and should offer a significant upgrade over older designs like the Polaris-based Radeon Pro 560X. It's a full-fat Vega chip with 20 compute units and a decent clock speed. We're expecting somewhere in the region of GTX 1050 or 1050 Ti performance for notebooks.
What we want to be clear though, is that this is not the Vega 20 7nm die shrink that we've been promised for the past year. Although that will likely be aimed at enterprise users and may not become a consumer GPU at all, it will be called Vega 20, which makes this whole product launch a little confusing.
In that instance, Vega 20 refers to the next-generation of the Vega graphics core, whereas the new Vega 20 product refers to the number of compute units it comes with. That's why its companion new GPU is the Vega 16. To give that some context, that's far more compute units than we see out of the surprisingly capable AMD Ryzen 2200G and 2400G APUs, which have eight and 11 compute units a piece in their Vega graphics cores, respectively.
The first laptop to make use of the Radeon Pro Vega 20 and 16 chips is the new configuration of the MacBook Pro 15, offering decent performance for 3D rendering and low-level gaming if desired.
