News - Next-gen Radeon series to use new nomenclature

[Boon72]

or you could just go simple and have year of release and high, mid, low and mobile :-) Radeon 13 high

[ET3D]

Sounds like a good way to confuse consumers into indecision. At least with the current scheme one can assume that a Radeon 9450 is better than a 8970, because it's a higher number. Now it will be R4 950 and R8 970. Oh, wait, it actually makes some sense this way. Well, I still think that it will be confusing.

[crossy]

Yeah, they'd [NVidia] never have any nonsense with some small letters at the end donating an entirely different card, or having the same chip represented with lots of different names...

Exactly - like I said - you know where you are with NVidia ... usually confused. "770Ti Super Overclocked" anyone?

Personally it's pretty simple to come up with a "better" scheme, just off the top of my head how about
RXXYY, where XX is the generation, so the first generation could be R00
and YY is the model id, 00-29 are low end, 30-59 are medium, 60-89 are high end cards, and 90+ are the dualed ones (like the 7990 is now). Mobile versions of the same chipset are postfixed "M".

Or work out something akin to Microsoft's "Windows Experience Index" and just use that - providing you got a scheme that had enough leeway to accommodate cards in the future wouldn't that be a clear method? Pair that up with a two digit gen id and give a range of 0-999, so we get "R01 345", "R04 789" and "R03M521" (that last one being a mobile device).

[Bagpuss]

When every website review out there will tell you which is the best card to buy at the budget you have, naming schemes are pretty much irrelevant anyway.

[kalniel]

so we get "R01 345", "R04 789" and "R03M521" (that last one being a mobile device).

Wouldn't look too good on the marketing side

It is tricky - there is a need to distinguish both product features and product performance (and possibly product efficiency). I don't think anyone has got it right so far, this revision at least isn't too far from the current one and helps distinguish product series (features) from performance segment.

[scaryjim]

e.g.

D019-4000

So is that faster or slower than a D023-3000, to a casual consumer who hasn't deeply researched the naming scheme? 23 is a bigger number and that comes first, so a D023 must be faster, right?

... e.g. is an R8 770XT a worse card than a R8 780

Given those would be cards from the same market segment and same generation, presumably they'd perform about the same (by current naming, a 7870XT v a 7880)

e.g. an R8 450 might get wiped by an R7 650 but just sound faster as most people will think the R bit is most important I reckon...

Of course - but how many shops are currently selling both new 4850s and new 6750s? (Incidentally, the 4850 would be about the same performance as the 6750 ).

The whole system relies on two things: AMD not messing with the market segmentation (hopefully they've learned from the 58x0/68x0 debacle), and retailers not hanging onto several generation-old stock. I don't think we'll really know how well it works until we get two or three generations of cards using the new naming scheme.

For AMD, of course, it might give more scope for the constant push of OEMs to have new card numbers every year. OEM wants a new card? This year's R8 750 becomes next year's R7 850, with next year's R8 850 ready to roll right in behind it.

I think we might some repositioning in the first instance to take better advantage of the available market segments: they've got nine to play with (or maybe ten if they pull a stunt like making the top tier cards the "RX", and given the tie in with FX CPUs I wouldn't put that past them ) so they could actually redistribute segments more evenly (maybe use 1-5 for integrated graphics and 6 - 9 for desktop, with the current 77x0 being shunted down to the R6 series?).

Oh how we geeks love to speculate, huh?

[buffus]

I like the new naming, it's a bit like the APU's:
A(segment)-(generation)(relative placing)(K, M, U, T, etc)
Only difference is the place of the M for mobile, but the regular spot is reserved for XT etc.
It'll take a week to get used to, but I think it's better...

[=assassin=]

I don't like the new naming scheme, seems overly complex. In protest, I might just make NVidia my next card purchase lol (currently using HD5850 )

[AETAaAS]

For those who are really keen, looks like they are going to be livestreaming the unveiling from Hawaii on the 25th.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHfmM6QYWNM