AMD develops ‘Arctic Islands’ family of graphics processing units

Advanced Micro Devices yet has to reveal its new families of graphics processing units this year, but already now the code-name of AMD’s 2016 graphics products lineup is known. Apparently, the company will continue to use names of islands to call its next-generation chips.

AMD’s next-generation family of Radeon GPUs will be called “Arctic Islands”, reports SweClockers. Therefore, expect code-names like Greenland, Svalbard, Ellesmere, Wrangel and others. At present nothing particular is known about the new family, except of the fact that it will traditionally cover every market segment from top to bottom. It is likely that the new graphics chips will be made using 14nm or 16nm FinFET process technologies.

AMD’s product families like “Southern Islands”, “Sea Islands” or “Volcanic Islands” may, or may not, be based on the same architecture. Traditionally, families contain chips that may belong to different generations and may have different feature-sets.

It is anticipated that AMD will reveal its all-new family of graphics processing units next year. The lineup will be based on a post-GCN architecture and will therefore bring-in new levels of performance and new functionality. Unfortunately, it is unknown whether the new GPUs will carry “Artic Islands” code-names.

It is expected that the “Arctic Islands” products will be sold under AMD Radeon R* 400-series brand names.

AMD did not comment on the news-story.

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KitGuru Says: A good news is that AMD seems to have a roadmap for 2016 and will have products to sell next year. Unfortunately, we have no idea how competitive will those products be and what levels of performance should we expect from them. In many cases AMD’s new product families are not all-new, but contain loads of previous-generation offerings.

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