A new roadmap appeared online from AMD, in this roadmap you can spot some plans and positioning for the future graphics cards based on the Polaris 10 and 11 GPU design. The roadmap also makes it pretty clear that there will be no rebrands.
The new slide shows product positioning of Polaris and confirms that Polaris 11 will be a more mainstream model with the Polaris 10 to be a high-end SKU series. Polaris 10 is "Ellesmere" and Polaris 11 is "Baffin.
We think it is safe to say that Polaris 10 will be the R9 490X series with 490 and 480 models (high-end). Polaris 11 will be the GPU replacing the 370 and 360 products, likely R7 470 and R9 470. It is unlikely that AMD will announce all products at once, so we expect Polaris 10 appear first around the Computex timeframe with an official launch later. Polaris introduces HVEC (h.265) decode and encode hardware-acceleration and will also support the latest display output standards like DisplayPort 1.3 (how does 3840x2160 @ 120Hz and 1920x1080 @ 480Hz sound?) and of course, HDMI 2.0.
The roadmap also confirms that the Vega architecture is to be released in 2017. Vega will het HBM2 memory and the successor to the current (enthusiast) Fury models. Later on in 2018 the NAVI architecture will be released, positioned with 'next-gen' memory.
In a recent find AMD Polaris 11 was spotted, Device ID 67FF:C8 codenamed “Goose”. This would be the base GPU for a several entry-level products. Now, the CompuBench database reports back that this device has 16 CUs with a maximum clock frequency of 1000 MHz. Multiple your CUs (compute units) by the number of shader processors per cluster (assuming that AMD keeps 64 per cluster) and you'll notice that Polaris 11 in this configuration has 1024 Shader processors tied to a 128-bit bus and 2048 MB of memory.
Polaris 10, codenamed "Ellesmere," would then feature over 2304 stream processors (36 CUs); and Vega 10 featuring 4096 stream processors, with 64 CUs. Things could end up looking like this:
| AMD Polaris / Vega GPU Specs (rumored) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Vega 10 | AMD Polaris 10 | AMD Polaris 11 (Dev_ID 67FF) | |
| GPU | Vega 10 / Greenland | Polaris 10 / Ellesmere | Polaris 11 / Baffin |
| Positioning | Enthusiast | High-end | Mainstream |
| Fabrication Process | 14nm FinFET | 14nm FinFET | 14nm FinFET |
| Compute Units | 64 | 36 | 16 |
| Stream Processors | 4096 | 2304 / 2560 | 1024 / 1280 |
| Computing Power | ~8.2 TFLOPs | ~3.7 TFLOPs | ~ 2.0 TFLOPs |
| Core clock | ~1000 MHz | ~800 MHz | ~1000 MHz |
| Effective Memory Clock | ~2000 MHz | ~6000 MHz | ~7000 MHz |
| Memory Bus | 4096-bit | 256-bit | 128-bit |
| Memory | 16GB HBM2 | 8GB GDDR5(x) | 2GB GDDR5 |
| Bandwidth | 1024 GB/s | 192 / 384 GB/s | 112 GB/s |
| Launch Date | 2017 | Q2 2016 | Q2 2016 |
Mind you that the specs shown in the CompuBench database might not be the full unlocked GPUs, so the CU numbers might even be higher. Which makes this news-item very speculative. We are inclined to say that Polaris 10 really would get 2560 shader processors.
Please click the thumbnail below to see the new roadmap slide.
New AMD roadmap gives more insight in polaris 10 and 11
