AMD's new obsession for marine wildlife might be a real thing. The chipmaker has named another forthcoming Radeon graphics card after a fish. On this occasion, AMD added initial support for Navy Flounder in the Linux display driver (opens in new tab) (via @Komachi (opens in new tab))
A couple of months ago, a rumor arose that AMD had caught on to users poking around its drivers to find clues of new product releases. There were whisperings that AMD started to use alternate codenames to hide its graphics cards from hardware snoopers. Sienna Cichlid (opens in new tab), which is presumed to be Navi 21, was the first example to jumped out of the water last month. And now, AMD is seemingly using the Navy Flounder codename to hide the Navi 22 silicon.
The Linux patch doesn't really provide much information to speculate on the finer details of the Navi 22 silicon. The description reads that "This patch set adds initial support for Navy Flounder GPUs." If we read between the lines, the statement implies that AMD might release multiple graphics cards that will be based on the Navi 22 die.
Similar to Sienna Cichlid, Navy Flounder could find itself with the implementation of the Video Core Next (VCN) 3.0 and Display Core Next (DCN) 3.0 engines. This bit of information at least suggests that Navy Flounder is a RDNA 2 graphics card. As you would recall, current Navi graphics cards are on VCN 2.0 and DCN 2.0.
Navy Flounder's appearance could only mean one thing. In the same vein as Sienna Cichild, AMD may intend to slip Navy Flounder support in the next Linux 5.9 merge window. The merge is expected to take place in August, meaning the final release might be here in October. The current prediction for a Big Navi launch is in September, which opens the floodgates to a potential Sienna Cichlid and/or Navy Flounder announcement.
