A fun little spot has been made today, there is an AMD entry seen in the AMD Linux driver that is stirring up the web. The entry nearly reads out like a pun really, but does suggest NAVI, the successor to Vega. Nobody knows why or what, but 7nm isn’t surely ready for GPUs, so as to why that entry is in there, remains speculation.
Perhaps a pun or driver test-case for the pending architectures in a simulation. The entry was spotted by German Computerbase who on their end spotted it at the beyond3d forums, and get ready for it, this is it:
new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET.enable [0: 0]
So the name is hidden under SUPER_SECRET codename. Typically the name of the GPU would be listed in the driver, but AMD put that … just like that, right there. NAVI would be AMD 7nm architecture. Earlier on there has been a rumor that with Vega is barely out of the doors, AMD already would moving forward to NAVI. Graphics cards in H2 2018 according to new information. It was rumored that a Navi-based professional card would be launching at SIGGRAPH 2018.
I must state that personally, I find next Summer a bit early for this part, as a refresh for Vega is far more plausible. Little is actually known about Navi, other then we know it’s fabbed at 7nm of course. AMD’s Navi GPUs will be built using GlobalFoundries’ 7nm node using 7LP technology.
