AMD recently took part in the Game Developers Conference and it used its stage time to tease a GPU roadmap for the next two years.
The company updated the timeline and now graphics processor enthusiasts have a clearer image of AMD's upcoming releases. Until 2018, at least.
Even though 2016 might be the year for Polaris, there is much hype building for 2017, as well. This is because next year the company will start implementing HBM2 on their next-generation graphics chips, which will be branded Vega architecture.
With the introduction of the HBM2 on the upcoming Vega chips, AMD delivers not only great amounts of super-fast memory, but an improved architecture as well.
Subsequently, AMD aims to move from Vega to Navi in 2018. The manufacturer touts that a "NextGen Memory" will come packed in the Navi GPUs.
Looking deeper into the new Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 GPUs, we find fourth-gen GCN cores that make use of HEVC encode/decode abilities. The long expected HDMI 2.0 capabilities are part of the menu, aside the DP1.3. One notable mention for the Polaris GPUs is that they rely on the novel 14 nm FinFET process, granting significant increases in processing speed.
The roadmap shows that Radeon Fury series are the main stars of 2015, followed by the Radeon 300 series. It should be noted that the Fury only takes about 20 percent of the graph.
For the 2016 column, we notice that both Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 share 50 percent of the year, meaning that AMD focuses more on the two GPUs than on the Fury range which sports HBM1.
The Radeon R9 480 and the Radeon R9 490 are bound to get the Polaris 10, while the Polaris 11 is set to land on entry-level and mid-level graphics cards. Based on this tidbit of information, we might conclude that AMD's Radeon 400 series will most likely pack 14nm chipsets.
Earlier this year, a tantalizing leak featuring an image of the Fury X2, the dual Fiji graphics board, reached the media. Techies who closely watch the GPU market should know that dual Fiji GPUs are not yet available for purchase, but they will be before the end of the year.
