Ever since AMD refreshed most of its Ryzen product range last year using GlobalFoundries' 12LP process—an enhanced version of the foundry's 14 nm FinFET node with higher-performance front-end-of-line transistors but only optional density improvements—and expanded that refresh to Radeons with the RX 590, I sort of expected the company to do the same with its Vega 10 graphics chip at some point. Instead, AMD surprised us at CES by introducing a consumer version of its Vega 20 data-center GPU on board a new graphics card: the Radeon VII. Taking Vega 20 out of the data center means AMD is first to market with a gaming GPU fabricated on TSMC's cutting-edge 7 nm FinFET process.
 
Vega 20 initially made an appearance in the Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 accelerators introduced late last year. Instead of making the biggest chip possible as quickly as possible like Nvidia has with its compute accelerator chips of late, Vega 20 only modestly expands the processing capabilities of the Vega 10 GPU to support some reduced-precision data types useful in deep learning applications. TSMC's 7-nm process is a real node shrink with all of the areal scaling such an advance implies, and it does most of the work in delivering a generation-on-generation performance improvement.