AMD Arcturus Might Be The Codename Succeeding Navi

While it will be a ways from release, the codename to the successor of the AMD Radeon "Navi" GPUs might be Arcturus.

Navi is the codename of the next-gen AMD GPUs due out in 2019 and is the nickname of the star Gamma Cassiopeiae. Current generation Vega also ties into the astronomical theme as it's the brightest star in the Lyra constellation.. It was "Polaris" that kicked off this theme with the Radeon RX 480 series launch. Now it looks like the AMD Navi successor might be Arcturus. Arcturus is a large red star and the brightest of the constellation of Boötes.

We found out about the Arcturus name today in our forums from our resident AMD Linux liaison when a reader was asking about all of the numbers involved in modern AMD GPU codenames like Vega 10, 11, and 20 and a preference for going back to GPU codenames like the days of Northern and Southern Islands.

Arcturus is expected to be the first codename under their revised scheme and still would tie into the solar system play. But any details beyond that name are non-existent at this point.

Update: It appears that the open-source Linux driver may begin seeing new codenames to help in assisting their open-source driver enablement earlier in the cycle without exposing the product/marketing name. It looks like Arcturus is their first chip with this scheme rather than the current family-sequence syntax.