AMD is all set to launch its next generation graphics card architecture namely AMD Navi, sometime in early 2019. The new architecture will be mainly competing in the mid range market as a successor to the Polaris 500 series GPU. There are many unanswered questions surrounding the Navi architecture but this is not what we are here for. Today we are going to talk about the post Navi architecture which you might be thinking is too early to talk about. But thanks to the Linux forum and news site Phoronix we have some early information.
According to the forum, it seems like an AMD employee has unveiled the name of AMD’s 7nm+manufacturing process GPU which would be called the Arcturus. He also discussed about the new lineup of graphics card would go back to the older naming scheme which we got before Vega. If we take a look at the recent GPU roadmaps, we can clearly see that AMD has planned out all the products release till 2020. The map shows that Vega 20 series products will get to an end by this year and we will likely be seeing the Navi in 2019. The roadmap has GPU codenames confirmed till “Navi” and everything beyond that is labeled “Next-Gen”. However, now we might have the name of the first graphics architecture codename for this part which is said to be Arcturus.
AMD gets its codenames inspiration from different stars in space which is pretty great. The “Arcturus” codename comes from the red giant star which is the fourth brightest star in the night sky. Similar to Vega and Navi, both of which are also some of the brightest stars visible in the night sky. This inspiration started from the time when RTG was made and the graphics boss, Raja Koduri (ex AMD RTG President who is now at Intel) put a lot of emphasis on bright stars when they initially presented Polaris.
The other interesting thing to note here is that AMD will also likely be bringing back their old naming scheme for their new Arcturus based GPUs which means that the naming scheme will be much easier to follow just like with Hawaii going inside the R9 290 series cards, Tahiti going inside the Radeon 7900 series cards and Fiji going inside the R9 Fury series cards. Tell us what you think about all this in the comments section below.