AMD's next-gen Vega 10, Vega 11 GPUs spotted in recent OpenCL driver

AMD has released its Polaris 10-based Radeon RX 480 into the wild, with the next-gen Vega architecture in the oven, and ready for early 2017. But now we're hearing rumors of the Vega 10 and Vega 11 GPUs, in the middle of 2016.

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In the new OpenCL driver, a few new chips were discovered under 'GFX9': Greenland, Raven1X, Vega10 and Vega 11. Greenland is something that has been swinging around the rumor mill for a while now, a new GPU that will reportedly rock 4096 stream processors, and a new SOC v15 architecture.

Vega on the other hand is a "high-end architecture for high-end gamers" according to AMD, and has an early 2017 release window. Vega will be the first GPU to utilize the faster HBM2 memory standard, which is something NVIDIA is using on its professional side of things on the Tesla P100 graphics card. Vega will be the first GPU to utilize the faster HBM2 memory standard, which is something NVIDIA is using on its professional side of things on the Tesla P100 graphics card.

Hynix has said that HBM2 will become more available in Q3, which is perfect timing for Vega - but will Vega 10 and Vega 11 use HBM2? Or will Vega 10 be the high-end chip with HBM2 while Vega 11 might drop down to GDDR5 or GDDR5X like the difference between NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070? We will see soon enough.

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