It has been topic of discussion many times, but the chatter on the web is much stronger this time. From the looks of it AMD might actually release the Radeon RX 490, maybe even before Christmas.

AMD on their end spilled a couple of beans a couple of times now, IF this new rumor is true then the Radeon RX 490 series could be released in December.

Dual Polaris 10 or VEGA 10 ?

If released, two things can happen here, it'll be a Dual-GPU Polaris based graphics card (2x RX 480), which is chatter that popped up the past week. If that is so it is likely a full Polaris 10 with 2304 shader processors, x2 = 4608 shader processors. Thing is that multi-GPU solutions like SLI and Crossfire are on the decline in popularity, so we hope that is not the case.

Now if we follow the old indication, it is based on a GPU called VEGA 10. Let's assume the latter one. After Polaris comes Vega, Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, the fifth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus. On earlier roadmaps VEGA was tagged as a HBM2 product. The start of the "Vega" would happen with Vega 10 (code-name) GPU, a series to compete with Nvidias more high-end gear like the GeForce GTX 1080. It's rumored to have 64 Compute Units, multiply that with 64 shader processors per cluster and you'll get to 4096 shader processors. It can offer up to 24 TFLOP/s 16-bit (half-precision) floating point performance. You read it right, half-precision. The GPU will be paired with either 8 or 16 GB HBM2 memory at an up-to 512 GB/s memory bandwidth, logic would dictate 8GB though.

A few months ago AMD's Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) chief Raja Koduri tweeted that development of "Vega10" had just crossed a milestone, although it's a long way to go before you can see it". A little while ago an RX 490 entry was listed on AMDs own website as well.

AMD has hasn't announced anything official yet about the RX 490, but December is now very likely. It'll be interesting to see if it is VEGA 10 or a Dual-GPU Polaris 10 based product, we'll have to wait and see what rabbit AMD pulls out of its hat.





