Possible Upcoming Polaris Radeon Refresh Spotted In Linux Kernel Update

With NVIDIA’s new GeForce RTX graphics cards now in the market, heads are once again turning towards AMD – what’s next for big red? Well, it seems pretty obvious that the Radeon team isn’t going to be able to counter Turing GeForce that soon, but it can still compete with Pascal of yore, and try to eat away at the market share it still commands. After all, not everyone wants to pay over $649 bare minimum for a new GPU.

AMD’s Polaris Radeon RX 480 & its nearest competition

Whatever happens in a Linux kernel doesn’t always dictate what happens in the outside world, but sometimes it can. Especially when a new model appears out of nowhere. The phine pholks at Phoronix have discovered one such occurrence of this, with a new PCI ID named 0x6FDF popping up. We don’t know what the end product will be called, but Phoronix knows that it’s at least Polaris-based.

If so, that means that an RX 680 could be en route, which is great for the most part, but fuels thoughts of mere clock-boosted products. Polaris first hit the market in the form of the Radeon RX 480, and was revised for the RX 580. That revision was dubbed Polaris 2, so it could be that this future part could become Polaris 3. Or, it could be some random new notebook SKU that’s not entirely interesting. But if that’s no fun to think about, a 12nm die-shrink of Polaris should spark some intrigue.

Since cards like the RX 580 have been out for a while at this point, a refresh of any sort on the Radeon side is going to be welcomed. This would come in addition to some major Vega movement being made before the year’s end, with AMD promises of 7nm product being shipped by the end of the year. That might not mean shipping to end customers, but it would mean early 2018 availability. For GPUs, we’ve been stuck at 12nm~16nm for years, so to envision a 7nm graphics card is really exciting, even if it’s going to be enterprise focused out of the gate.