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AMD Employee Reveals The Name Of Upcoming AMD GPU Architecture

This has been a great year for AMD, largely because of their processors, GPUs, not so much. Both the Vega 64 and Vega 56 were very famous mining cards but didn’t see any widespread commercial success, although not because they were bad products, but because Nvidia had better offerings at similar price points.
Even in GPUs, AMD has been competing in the low and mid end only for quite sometime and we are yet to see a true flagship contender, after the likes of the R9 290X. Although both the Vega 64 and Vega 56 were high end cards, they we badly priced compared to Nvidia’s lineup and consequently had a very bad dollar to performance ratio.
Part of this can be attributed to AMD’s decision to go with HBM memory for their Vega desktop cards. Now AMD was working on HBM from a long time, and even technology wise it was promising, HBM theoretically had superior memory bandwidths compared to DDR5. But manufacturing proved to be very costly, mainly because it wasn’t used as much. Nvidia went the DDR5X way for their high end cards, which did have a decent bandwidth increase. DDR5 memory was extensively used, so the price of the modules was lower compared to the HBM ones.
After the launch of the RTX cards recently, people have been waiting for an answer from AMD, but so far it’s been very silent. We are expected to see 7nm Vega cards from AMD this year.
Recently, an AMD employee in the Phoronix forums stated that AMD was actually going to go back to their old naming scheme, think HD 7000. He also stated that this was going to take place from the Arcturus architecture, which is due in 2020.
This is great news infact, because the Vega GPUs have a very confusing naming scheme, with the APUs and the desktop cards named abruptly.
AMD after their HD XXXX naming scheme, turned to the RX branding to spice things up. They continued the RX branding until very recently, after which they changed to Vega.
Talking about the Arcturus architecture, nothing is known yet, only that it will be on the 7nm++ node. But it’s naming is in line with other AMD architecture names, Arcturus is actually a name for the red giant star. Even Vega and Navi are named after stars.
There’s no information on the upcoming Vega 2018 GPUs, but given the recent pricing on the RTX cards, we really need some competition in this space. This article was sourced from the Phoronix forums, which is also the original source, you can check them out here.



Indranil Chowdhury and mundophone