AMD's 12nm Polaris 30 GPU Family Allegedly Primed For Launch
Hot on the heels of NVIDIA releasing its GeForce RTX series based on Turing with fancy-pants real-time ray tracing and AI technologies embedded within, AMD is set to launch...another Polaris part? So it goes, if the rumor mill is to believed, with AMD said to be prepping a new graphics card based on a 12-nanometer tweak of Polaris.
It's been a rough year for AMD in terms of graphics development. Vega is not the Pascal killer that many people hoped it would be, and by extension, it's not on the same level as Turing (even without real-time ray tracing and DLSS). AMD also lost multiple members of its graphics division, including head honcho Raja Koduri and marketing maven Chris Hook, both of which are now at Intel.
Be that as it may, AMD is hard at work on its Navi GPU architecture as part of going all-in with 7nm fabrication on both its GPU and CPU products. So what's this about a 12nm Polaris refresh? The rumor originates from a forum member at Chiphell. According to user WJM47196, AMD will release a new graphics card in October with a 12nm Polaris GPU underneath the hood.
This same source stated back in June that AMD was poised to release a 12nm Polaris GPU by the end of the year, at the time referring to it as Polaris 30. According to that post, Polaris 30 will deliver around a 15 percent performance boost, presumably over Polaris 20. If the rumor is true, we would also expect a bump in clockspeeds, and perhaps better power efficiency to boot.
We're not putting a ton of stock into the chatter, though we suppose it makes sense from the standpoint of AMD wanting to biding its time until Navi arrives. The company is not competing at the high-end right now. That being the case, it might be a financially strategic move to inject cheaper mid-range and low-end cards into the marketplace, especially with GeForce RTX pricing being so high initially.
