Next Generation AMD Graphics Card Naming Is Revealed

A new report from TechPowerUp has revealed the naming structure of AMD’s next generation of graphics cards. For as long as I can remember AMD/ATi graphics cards have been denoted by the Radeon HD xyz0 naming scheme with X denoting the generation (aka HD 7000 series), y the market segment (aka HD 7900 series, HD 7800 series) and z the variant of that segment (HD 7970, HD 7950 etc). However, with Volcanic Islands, which is the next generation of AMD graphics cards, this all changes.

The structure is now Ry xz0. As daunting as that looks due to the mish-mash of letters let me break down what it exactly means. The market segment (y) is paired up with an R, the generation number (x) begins the secondary part and is paired up with the market segmentation (z)…. so if we translate some current graphics into this nomenclature the HD 7970 would be R9 770 and a HD 7870 would be R8 770 while a HD 6990 would be R9 690.

Of course we don’t know if AMD will keep the same structure of product segmentation such as the 30/50/70/90 suffix, they might possibly use 40/60/80 instead for example. The reports also indicate their will be another indicator or “X” for the purposes of one of our examples… R9 770 X. This X would indicate a special feature about the product although no one is sure exactly what.

TechPowerUp report examples of R9 280 X for the next-generation desktop graphics and R9 M380 X for the next generation notebook graphics so we are presuming these are models which have popped up in their GPU-Z database. While the new naming scheme isn’t totally straight forward, once we have details of the actual cards we will see it should be much easier to explain.

Image courtesy of AMD