There's been some discussion over the upcoming AMD Navi generation of graphics cards about whether it would be built on an entirely new architecture, or whether it would still leverage the Graphics Core Next design which has been at the heart of AMD GPUs since 2012's 7000-series, or whether it would use something new. It looks like AMD isn't quite ready to move on from GCN just yet, as we now have confirmation that Navi is built on that near-seven-year-old technology.
As WCCFTech highlights, a recently discovered note in an AMD Radeon driver for Linux contains a reference to GFX1010. Considering GFX900 is Vega, it makes a lot of sense that GFX1010 would be Navi. Right alongside that note is one for AMDGCN, confirming that Navi is built on the GCN architecture.
What's intriguing about this is it suggests that like previous generations of AMD GPUs, Navi will likely be constrained by GCN's limit of 4,096 steam processors. That could form a hard limit on its overall performance, but it does bring us back to a previous claim by AMD that Navi was very "scalable." That could mean a return to its classic dual-GPU board designs, like the 295X, which was a competitive graphics card with some of the best in the world until very recently, despite being a very old design.
It could also mean that we'll see AMD push for multiple GPU setups. The mGPU design that Nvidia and AMD currently utilize has seen very little support in the wild, but if AMD could encourage it and Navi scales well across multiple cards, it would be interesting to see how it competes with Nvidia's best.
Navi is expect to debut at Computex at the end of May, with a potential release in the months to follow.
