AMD Polaris Radeon 400 Series GPUs To Flesh Out Entire Desktop Stack, Sans Rebrands

Beyond the occasional nugget from AMD, concrete details about its forthcoming Polaris GPU architecture are hard to come by. We've mostly had to rely on leaked information and rumors, and if the latest leaked roadmap is to believed, Polaris will replace both the Radeon Fury and Radeon 300 series of graphics cards.

The slide shows Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 in place of the Radeon Fury and Radeon 300 series, with Polaris 10 overlapping both. While nothing is yet official, the leaked roadmap, which at least looks legitimate, hints at the possibility of AMD not releasing any rebranded graphics cards as part of its Polaris-based Radeon 400 series.


Of course this is all speculation, but while it looks as though Polaris will occupy the entire desktop space for AMD, it's difficult to picture the company pulling the plug on Fury straight away. It's feasible that AMD will keep Fury around after its initial Polaris launch, allowing it to coexist with Polaris 10 cards up through the end of the year.

One thing that's interesting is the size of the Polaris 10 block on the roadmap compared to the Fury block that precedes it. That could mean nothing, or it might point to Polaris 10 being used on not just the Radeon R9 490 series, but also R9 480 series graphics cards. That would still leave Polaris 11 with the mid-range and entry-level tiers, leaving no room for rebrands.

It's all a guessing game at the moment, though not for long. Robert Hallock, part of AMD's Technical Marketing team, recently held a lengthy seven-hour Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on reddit in which he indicated a mid-year release for Polaris. If AMD sticks with that, we'd be looking at a Polaris launch sometime this summer.

Looking beyond Polaris, AMD is planning to release its Vega architecture with High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2) next year, and its Navi architecture with "NextGen Memory" in 2018, according to the roadmap.