At the current time we appear to be on the threshold of some exciting launches from AMD. There is the upcoming New Horizon event, scheduled for Tuesday 13th Dec, where we are promised a sneak peek at Zen CPUs in action. Furthermore, AMD looks close to officially teasing, revealing, or even launching the first Vega 10 GPU powered graphics cards. Hopefully New Horizon will provide a bit of Vega 10 magic as well as the promised Zen content.
Earlier this week we saw an intriguing new entrant in the Ashes of the Singularity (AOtS) benchmarks online result browser. The GPU device code and performance achieved suggested the benchmark was of a new high-end Polaris, or the first Vega-powered, graphics card.
Now some new clues have turned up, providing hints to AMD's graphics card launch plans. As reported by VideoCardz, a MacOS Sierra user was poking around files in this latest Apple desktop OS release and found some interesting device strings.
Alongside the expected and known entrants such as Polaris 10 and 11, we see the expected Vega 10. However there are a couple of surprise entrants:
- Polaris 12: this could well be the mystery single GPU card with device ID 687F:C18, tested in AOtS at the weekend.
- Polaris 10 XT2: who wouldn't put money on this being a dual-Polaris GPU equipped graphics card?
The theory put forward by VideoCardz is that all the Radeon RX 400 series will be wholly Polaris-based. Vega packing cards will replace the Fury series. So a brand new lineup would be required for any Radeon RX 500 series.
Don't forget your new AMD drivers
AMD users remember - there is going to be a refreshed driver set launched later today, the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition drivers. Perhaps some AMD users will poke around those new Windows driver files with a Hex Editor…