AMD revealed an updated roadmap for its future GPUs. The company has been criticized for being slow out of the gate with its upcoming Polaris launch, but if the roadmap is any indication, we’re about to see an acceleration in the company’s pace.
We already know that AMD plans to launch Polaris in the second half of this year. The company said that Polaris is expected to deliver up to 2.5x performance per watt, but the first products will be targeted at notebook computers. We don’t know when Polaris will hit the high-end desktop market, but the slide for AMD’s roadmap seems to indicate that it could be short-lived if it does.
The slide indicates that in the early months of 2017, we’ll see the first Vega GPUs equipped with HBM2 memory. The graph doesn’t map the curve, but given Vega’s position above Polaris, we can infer 3.5x to 4x performance per watt compared to 28nm GPUs.
Furthermore, AMD’s slide indicates that Navi, the successor to Vega, will offer even better efficiency and is expected to launch in the beginning of 2018. The slide indicates that Navi will employ some unknown “next gen memory” technology. The slide also states that Navi will feature scalability, but without context, it’s hard to infer what that would mean.
This is simply a roadmap, and as such is subject to change, but it gives us a little glimpse at what AMD is planning for the coming years.
