New AMD roadmap provides insight into Polaris 10 and 11 . positioning
A new roadmap from AMD has appeared online, which outlines the plans for the future graphics cards. The roadmap seems to suggest that there will be no rebrands in the R9 400 series, but that all cards will get a Polaris 10 or 11 GPU.
While the information matches a roadmap AMD released in March, the new image, published by Videocardz, provides some insight into the precise positioning of Polaris 10 and 11. The former is known to make its way to the most powerful video cards in the market. AMD and that Polaris 11 will be used for more economical cards with less processing power.
The roadmap shows the current situation, with the Fury cards at the top and the R9 300 series below. The diagram seems to indicate that the Polaris 10 GPUs are being used more widely. Not only for the very fastest cards to follow the Furys, but also a large part of the R9 300 series may be followed up with a Polaris 10 variant.
Presumably the fastest card with Polaris 10-gpu is known as the R9 490X. If AMD wants to supply the same number of variants as in the R9 300 series, an R9 490, R9 480X and R9 480 could be positioned below that. Earlier there were rumors that possibly only the R9 490 models would get a Polaris 10-gpu, but the new roadmap seems to indicate that the most advanced gpu will also be used for lower-positioned video cards. It is likely that parts of the chip will be switched off to improve the yields, or it will be a modified die.
The Polaris 11 GPU will make its way to the lower-ranked cards. Probably the successors of cards such as the R7 370 and R7 360. They may be called R9 470 and R7 460. AMD is unlikely to introduce all of its new Polaris cards at once. The top models are expected to be announced first. That will probably happen around the end of May.
Furthermore, the roadmap emphasizes that the new Vega architecture will come in 2017. These video cards will use hbm2 memory and thus appear to be the successors of the Fury cards. These absolute top models will probably be sold alongside the Polaris GPUs. In 2018, the Navi architecture will follow which will receive ‘nextgen’ memory. No information is known about this yet.