According to VR-Zone, AMD will reshape it’s current naming schema for GPU segment.
AMD has decided to standardize their whole product lineup to carry a similar naming system. The recent news about Volcanic Islands, a new Radeon series, which are arriving in few months, are getting more clearer every day. First we thought that the upcoming Radeon series would be named as HD 8000, which soon was confirmed not to be true. Today we learn that Radeon HD 9000 series will in fact be named as Radeon R9-xxxx. This naming scheme will correspond to the current APU segment where you can find for instance A8 or A10. It is unknown at this moment if AMD will move on with the R9-9000 system as if they continued with the current x000 system or if they rewind the numbering.
Few years ago AMD did a similar thing with Radeon X series (Radeon X1950XTX) by replacing X with HD. Now HD will be replaced by R(x).
The upcoming flagship, currently known as Radeon HD 9970 could have few different names. If AMD decides to leave R9 as an indicator for series (Radeon 9000), then the new card could be named as Radeon R9-x970, but Radeon R9-9970 wouldn’t really make sense now. By looking closely at APU models, where we have three different architectures for AMD A8 APU: Llano A8-3800, Trinity A8-5500 and Richland A8-6500, one would expect R9 to indicate a performance segment, not the series. And this somehow finds its verification in previous rumors.
Meet the Radeon R3 and Radeon R5
Few weeks ago SemiAccurate spotted something interesting in the latest drivers:
- AMD Radeon APU A6-6200 with R3 Graphics
- AMD Radeon R5 M200 series
Both entires indicate that we are expecting at least two performance segments: entry-level R3 and R5. Of course this would be followed by R6, R7 and so on. SemiAccurate thought that the M-part in M200 label is just to indicate that we are looking at a Mobile GPU. What it also means is that AMD would rewind the naming to x200, so we may not see any x970 Radeon card after all.
Meet the Radeon R8 and Radeon R9
I made a short analysis, the new naming could look like this:
- Radeon 9970-> Radeon R9-xxxx -> R9-(i)970 followed by R9-(i+1)970
- Radeon 9870 -> Radeon R8-xxxx -> R8-(i)870 followed by R9-(i+1)870
As you can see I didn’t use Desktop part in the naming, because AMD always ends the label with ‘0’ (proof). Thus, this way we can transform the current lineup to something we can actually understand in the future (with the D it would look like this: R9-DX97, where X stands for series). I have spoken with my sources and they confirm that Radeon 9000 series will feature the new naming, probably Radeon R(x). However this leaves me with a problem how to name the upcoming Hawaii-based flagship. If you have any ideas make sure to drop them in the comments. Although for the sake of clarity I will most likely still refer to it as 9970.
Source: VR-Zone, SemiAccurate
