AMD Unveils Upcoming GPU Roadmap – Capsaicin

Even as Polaris approaches us quickly within 3 months, the planning for its successor has long been in the works. At their Capsaicin event, AMD took off the wraps for their upcoming GPU plans with a roadmap detailing the planned releases up till 2019. In keeping with the star nomenclature that started with Polaris and ditching the islands, we will have Vega and then Navi following Polaris.

Starting off with Polaris later this year, AMD’s main selling point it seems is the 2.5x performance per watt the new GCN architecture will bring. This is no doubt due to the combination of improved hardware itself, the new 14nm LPP process and DX12 finally making use of the previously wasted hardware resources like asynchronous controllers and shaders.

Moving along, we have Vega to release in what looks to be early 2017. The biggest change it seems is the use of HBM2, replacing GDDR5(X) and HBM1 no doubt. This means we can no doubt expected all Vega releases to utilize HBM2. While this may suggest Polaris won’t be using HBM2, it could also mean that only certain Polaris chips, likely only the high-end ones, will use HBM2.

Finally, we come to Navi, which should debut in early 2018. This release will have scalability and use of next-gen memory like Hyper-Memory Cube for instance. The scalability mention suggests either the use of smaller GCN units used to build the chip to better suit the market or a new process node. For now, we are probably better off trying to figure out what Polaris will be