AMD Polaris 12 Mentioned in Linux Patches

AMD‘s Polaris architecture was unveiled this year in the form of the RX 460, RX 470 and RX 480. The Polaris 10 series is designed for entry-level VR and consumers wanting to play the latest games at high settings while Polaris 11 targets eSport players. Recently, there has been a lot of speculation regarding the RX 490 and if the range will be extended beyond the current offerings. Interestingly, Polaris 12 was spotted by Redditors in Linux’s amdgpu graphics driver and seems to have the same setup code and block limitations as Polaris 11. As a result, the architecture looks likely to be a rebadge or slightly refined version. Here we can see the mentions to Polaris 12 directly in the amdgpu patch 0/3:

The listing even discloses the six device IDs which indicates the GPU will come in a decent number of flavours:

Not only that, the device IDs 6980:00 and 699F:C5 have been benchmarked in Ashes of the Singularity:

In the GFXBench, the 6980:00 was compared against the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050Ti:

According to the results, I wouldn’t be too surprised if it refers to mobile chips which have a low power draw and provide a decent gaming experience. Clearly, it’s not going to break any performance records or compete with the current range. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see it being mentioned and I’m looking forward to hearing more details about how it fits in with other AMD products. As per usual, more information regarding the performance, specification and architecture will be unveiled in due course.