One of the ways to get hidden information on upcoming products is to look in new drivers that should have support for the hardware coming our way. This is what someone has done to certain new Linux drivers and bam! – something has popped up. More precisely we are talking about several upcoming Polaris GPUs by AMD, which should be on the market this summer.
It turns out that the so-called Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 GPUs have other code names. Polaris 11 is known as Baffin, while Polaris 10 is known as Ellesmere but AMD has cancelled these names in order to use the Polaris brand name followed by a number to distinguish the different GPUs inside the Polaris line. Also, according to the information found in the drivers, the Polaris line will consist of six Polaris 11 models and two Polaris 10 video cards. Chances are that the Polaris 10 models will be high-end models – they may be called Radeon R9 490 and Radeon R9 490X. In addition to this the two GPUs will likely work with GDDR5 memory. The Polaris 10 cards will have 256-bit memory buses, while Polaris 11 GPUs will sport 128-bit memory buses, which once again hints that Polaris 11 will be a sub-line of mid-range GPUs.
One of the main features of Polaris will be greatly reduced power consumption but we will see how low AMD has gotten once the Polaris GPUs become official, which will be sometime this summer.
Source: Videocardz.com