We’ve very close to seeing the actual hard launch of the Polaris family of GPUs. We’ve received and are hard at work benchmarking and otherwise testing the RX 480 that’s arrived from AMD. But though the RX 480 and it’s little brothers are almost here, AMD is not sitting on it’s laurels. Raja Koduri himself just traveled to China to celebrate a milestone regarding Vega. And that means it’s just that much closer to being released.

Polaris 10 is almost here, but Vega 10 is getting ever closer

We already have heard many rumors about how the Ellesmere GPU is supposed to perform, and we also know that it isn’t the large die either. That GPU, the large variant of the improved GCN 4.0 is still yet to come, so the performance we will see with Polaris 10, review coming shortly, is only the tip of the iceberg. Vega 10 has been in development for quite some time, and they’re already celebrating an important milestone. I wonder what it might be?

AMD has decided to go in a different direction for this generation, focusing on the very best performance per watt in smaller packages than in the past. This isn’t Fiji, and it was never billed to be. This is about making an efficient GPU that performs beyond what we might have expected, given the previous generation. And Vega 10 will take the improvements that have been made internally to the cores themselves, the geometry processor and the memory controller and multiply that by quite a bit more. And AMD is certainly working very diligently at tuning Vega 10 for the best. And we should be treated to something much nicer than what we’ll see next week. Which is rumored to be quite nice.

RX 480, the father of Vega 10