AMD might be preparing a new series of Polaris GPU for use in their upcoming graphics cards. A leak from the latest MacOS drivers spotted by Videocardz reveal that AMD has two new Polaris chips planned.

AMD Polaris 12 and Polaris 10 XT2 GPUs Leaked - Spotted in MacOS Drivers, Coming To Radeon Cards?

According to the drivers, AMD has three new chips prepped up for launch soon. These include Polaris 10 XT2, Polaris 12 and Vega 10. Now the surprising thing is not the Vega listing but the two Polaris cards which we have never heard about. The two Polaris chips are new and we get a few hints by their naming scheme.

AMD Polaris 12 GPU:

The Polaris 12 naming scheme comes from the fact that the chip was designed after Polaris 11. The higher number doesn't necessarily mean higher power as Polaris 10 is faster than Polaris 11. What it means is that Polaris 11 was designed after Polaris 10 and Polaris 12 was designed after Polaris 11. There are a number of things we can speculate over here. First of all, why is AMD preparing a new chip so close to the Vega launch?

The answer could be a new Radeon family. AMD's Vega GPUs with HBM2 will be part of a new family and will be aimed at enthusiast market. This means that Polaris 12 and other chips designed before it will be aiming the mainstream section. Imagine a Radeon 500 series line which has Vega cards cover the top spectrum and Polaris cards covering the more mainstream market. This could be the most ideal case scenario.

AMD can also use the new core for their current lineup which currently has space left in the top-tier market such as RX 490 but that may not happen as Vega will be covering the high-end section for AMD soon (1H 2017).

AMD Polaris 10 XT2 GPU:

The AMD Polaris 10 XT2 GPU is a safe bet as we know the XT2 moniker is used for enhanced GPU revisions. The Polaris 10 XT2 can be a new revision designed for Polaris 10 featuring better clock speeds and better efficiency. In such a case, the Polaris 10 XT2 GPU would be known as Radeon RX 485 and Radeon RX 475 which AMD already made it clear when detailing their Radeon 400 series naming scheme.

Do not mistake the XT2 as a dual chip card as this driver is only referring to GPU names. Polaris 10 XT2 will be a higher performance chip with the same number of cores. This chip could be offered in either the Radeon 400 series or Radeon 500 series.

AMD Vega 10 GPU:

Finally, we have Vega 10 GPU appearing for the first time in public drivers. In 2017, AMD finally plans to upgrade all of their GPUs to the new FinFET architecture. While Polaris serves the mainstream, Vega will be aiming for the high-end market. The new graphics chip for Deep Learning will be the Vega 10, a very beefy GPU which we detailed yesterday. AMD Vega 10 is expected to launch in first quarter of 2017.

We now know that Vega 10 can feature up to 4096 stream processors based on a new GCN uARCH (GFX9). The chip has as much as 24 TFLOPs of half-precision and 12 TFLOPs of single precision compute performance. The chip also features up to 16 GB of HBM2 that is clocked to operate at 512 GB/s. The cards based on this chip are rated with 225W TDP.

All of these updates are really nice to hear but will be even more impressive to see these chips / cards in action. We can hope for some showcase at the December 13th "New Horizon" event.

AMD Next Generation Vega 10, 11, 20 and Dual GPU Graphics Card Rumored Lineup: