Sunday rumor mill: Polaris 20 and Ryzen 16-core

Here’s something for your Sunday coffee break.  

Rumor 1: AMD Polaris 20, Polaris 21 and Polaris 12

AMD is allegedly renaming its Polaris GPUs.

According to the rumor from Bench.life, AMD is planning a refresh in naming for Polaris GPUs. The AMD Polaris 10 would be renamed to Polaris 20 and Polaris 11 to Polaris 21. The only new GPU in The Radeon RX 500 product lineup would be Polaris 12. To be specific, AMD is allegedly also replacing XT and PRO codenames in favor of XTX and XL. From the marketing standpoint, this would be the only major change for Radeon RX 500 series.

However, this rumor does not end here. According to to the same site, AMD will allegedly use 14nm FinFET LPP (Low Power Plus) process, rather than 14nm FinFET LPE (Low Power Early) process as “it did” for Polaris (2016). The only problem is, there is no information that AMD was using LPE process for Polaris 1X in the first place. In fact, GlobalFoundaries do not even list such process on their website and plans LPP production for AMD products were announced back in 2015. That said, I would be very skeptical about this part because to my knowledge Polaris was already manufactured in LPP.

But let’s go back to Polaris 20. In case you don’t remember, we reported that AMD’s long-term plans include Vega 20 refresh. The chip would allegedly receive a new 7nm fabrication node. So it would appear that AMD is using “20” codenames for GPU refreshes. What we don’t know is how much improvement could we expect from Polaris 2X.

Rumor 2: AMD Ryzen 16-cores/32-threads

AMD still keeping an ace up their sleeve?

This rumor actually started on Chiphell. It was then ‘confirmed’ by someone with access to better sources on AnandTech forums. Now, here’s CanardPC tweet, pushing this rumor even further.

The ‘news’ are that AMD is allegedly working on even faster Ryzen. A CPU for HEDT (High-End Desktop) platform, which is currently occupied by Intel Broadwell-E processors. While AMD Ryzen 7 can compete with Intel in productivity and raw performance, there are still two things that make Intel stay in the game. These are quad-channel memory support or access to more PCI-E lanes.

According to CanardPC AMD is indeed working in such high-performance CPU. This new Ryzen would feature 16-core and 32-threads. The chip itself would actually consist of two dies, making it much bigger. Such chip would obviously generate a lot of heat and it would also require a lot of power. The French magazine claims that TDP would be around 150W, but it may not necessarily translate directly into power consumption. If we were to believe this tweet, then the clock speeds would not be higher than 3.0 GHz — CP claims that clocks are between 2.4 and 2.8 GHz.

The tweet also claims that new Ryzen would receive quad-channel DDR4 support and new LGA SP3r2 socket, which was mentioned back in January here. What’s also interesting is the claim that new HEDT platform would be called X399. While I find this unlikely, as it does not fit into AMD naming scheme (I would rather expect X380 or X390), such name would definitely make Intel angry, as it would claim the name ‘reserved’ for Intel’s future HEDT platform.