AMD may have ditched using islands as names for GPUs, but that decision looks to have come after the GPUs that would become Polaris were created. The company’s open-source Linux driver code for Polaris has revealed several lines of code refering to two products known as “Baffin” and “Ellesmere”
Of course, that itself doesn’t say much by itself. However, Baffin’s code mirrors that of Polaris 11; while the same can be said about Ellesmere and Polaris 10. According to VideoCardz, these findings indicate that AMD did in fact change the names of its upcoming 14nm FinFet GPUs. If that wasn’t convincing enough, then surely the following line of code will be:
Fortunately, a name change isn’t the only discovery inside AMD’s Linux Source code. Based on the lines of code earlier, one can clearly see that there are in fact six Polaris 11 GPUs and two Polaris 10 GPUs, which may indicate the amount of Polaris-based GPUs AMD is set to unveil. There are more Polaris 11 GPUs because they are rumoured to be manufactured for both desktop and mobile systems.
ADVERTISEMENT
There are no indications to whether Polaris-based graphics cards will be utilising GDDR5 or the more powerful GDDR5X memory standard. Unfortunately, according to sources, it will be very unlikely that Polaris-based graphics cards will utilise HBM1. Despite this, one thing’s for sure: both versions of Polaris GPUs will definitely be made available sometime this year.
(Source: VideoCardz , TechFrag)
