Report: AMD's Volcanic Islands to be Called Radeon R-200
New information has surfaced regarding a new naming system for AMD's upcoming Volcanic Islands graphics cards.
While earlier we heard that AMD would be shuffling the naming scheme for (some) of its Kabini APUs, it appears now that AMD might be doing the same thing for its upcoming Volcanic Islands graphics cards.
A report from VideoCardz, based on a GPU-Z validation from TechPowerUp, indicates that the Volcanic Islands series will be classified as the R-200 series graphics cards.
The idea is that there would be two parts to the name, a prefix after the R, as well as a three-digit identifier. For example, the R9-series would be the high-end graphics cards, the R8-series would be the high/mid-range graphics cards, R7-series as mid-range graphics cards, and so on. This prefix would remain through the upcoming generations as an identifier for what class the graphics card would be.
The second part of the name would be a three-digit identifier. For example, VideoCardz.com has predicted that the AMD Radeon HD 7970's successor, which we would previously have thought would have been called the Radeon HD 9970, might be called the AMD Radeon R9-285. The successor to that card would then be called the AMD Radeon R9-385. The table below contains a few more of the predictions:
| Radeon HD 7000 | Radeon R-200 | Radeon R-300 |
|---|---|---|
| AMD Radeon HD 7990 -> | AMD Radeon R9 290 -> | AMD Radeon R9 390 |
| AMD Radeon HD 7970 -> | AMD Radeon R9 285 -> | AMD Radeon R9 385 |
| AMD Radeon HD 7950 -> | AMD Radeon R9 280 -> | AMD Radeon R9 380 |
| AMD Radeon HD 7870 -> | AMD Radeon R8 275 -> | AMD Radeon R8 375 |
| AMD Radeon HD 7850 -> | AMD Radeon R8 270 -> | AMD Radeon R8 370 |
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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Sure would be nice if both AMD and Nvidia would find a naming scheme they like and stick to it. It's getting confusing when they use each others past model names for new cards!Reply
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aggroboy They could just remove the R9/R8, since model numbers 270-390 seems self-explanatory.Reply -
JeremyCT A prefix comes before the root word/term. A suffix comes after. The 9 is a suffix.Reply
I'm not sure I like the new convention. Too similar to nVidia's, and yet complicated in its own right. -
phatboe I Don't like this new naming scheme, how will I know if this is the current generation or a previous generation model?Reply -
Pinhedd Reply11492820 said:This sound reasonable as there are only two digits left to mark new series (8xxx-9xxx)
They already had popular Radeon 8000 and 9000 series cards. They've been off the shelf for more than a decade but I can see why they would want to avoid confusion.
Oddly enough, the internal codename for the Radeon 8000 and 9000 series GPUs made from 2001 to 2003 was "R200". It looks to me like they've decided to go full circle on the naming conventions.