Rumor | AMD's 12 nm Polaris 30 GPU coming in Q4 2018, 7 nm gaming GPUs coming in 2019

Nvidia is clearly not threatened by AMD’s current GPU lineup, and there still are analysts that claim the GTX 11xx is not really needed right now because AMD has not yet matched Nvidia’s performance for decent prices. In reality, GTX 11xx is coming this summer, whether AMD is prepared or not. AMD did announce it is preparing to launch 7 nm GPUs for the server markets, but no details were revealed about any new gaming GPUs. Chinese rumors have it that AMD is secretly prepping some GTX 11xx competitors based on 12 nm chips codenamed Polaris 30 for late 2018.

According to user WJM47196 from Chiphell forums, the Polaris 30 is an improved 12 nm FinFET version of the Polaris 20 launched last year, so it should be available in sufficient quantities at launch, unlike the RX Vega chips. The performance gain over the Polaris 20 is said to be around 15%, bringing it close to what RX Vega 56 is offering. Still the RX Vega chips are not even considered mainstream and their performance compared to Nvidia’s GTX 1070/1080 solutions is barely comparable.

As previously mentioned, AMD also intends to release 7 nm GPUs for the server segment in late 2018. While the server segment is not really linked to gaming products, AMD is also rumored to begin shipping budget gaming GPUs based on the 7 nm chips in early 2019. The real GTX 11xx competitors, however, are expected to arrive in late 2019. These high-end solutions will use HBM2 video memory chips, and it looks like the budget GPUs will get the GDDR6 VRAM.

The GPU market might not really be a great focus for AMD right now, but, at least the company is doing well on the CPU side of things. It may be wise for AMD to concentrate on the CPU market, and offer mid-range GPUs only, since Intel is also planning to storm the GPU market in early 2019.

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