AMD readies impressionist and surrealist APUs for 2020 release

Recent amendments to the AMDGPU Linux driver have hinted at some of AMD's upcoming APUs. Spotted by Michael Larabel of Phoronix and brought to our attention via Guru3D, these patches confirm that AMD is working to bring to new APU lines to market next year. The eagle-eyed among you may recognise the two APUs, which AMD has codenamed Renoir and Dali.

According to an AMD sales kickoff roadmap leaked last year, Dali will be the company's affordable mobile APU offering, while Renoir will feature as more expensive desktop and mobile APUs. The patches, which you can read on freedesktop.org, confirm that Dali will succeed existing Picasso APUs.

Meanwhile, another patch confirms that Renoir APUs will have the "same VCN2.x block as Navi1x". VCN is an acronym for Video Core Next, AMD's dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. However, Renoir APUs will be based on the Vega architecture according to Phoronix, which may disappoint those who were hoping that it would be Navi-based instead. Having Navi-level hardware encoding and decoding should offer some improvements over existing Picasso APUs though. If last year's leaked roadmap is accurate, then you can expect Dali and Renoir to start appearing in desktops and laptops from next year.