Clues have been popping here and there regarding a possible new Polaris revision being launched by AMD in the (relatively) near future. Speculation first reared its head regarding a revised "Polaris 30" silicon, allegedly being built for TSMC's 12 nm process - not unlike AMD's 2000-series Ryzen CPUs. The company has been enamored with trying out and adapting new foundry processes for its products as soon as possible, now that they've found themselves fabless and not having to directly support the R&D costs necessary for process node development themselves.

Some publications are pointing towards a 15% performance improvement being achieved on the back of this process change for Polaris - which, if achieved only via a new process implementation, would require clock speed increases that are higher than that. AMD has already launched their revised Polaris 20 RX 500 series, which built upon their RX 400 series (and Polaris 10) by upping the clocks as well. A smaller node would likely be associated with higher yields and decreased costs per finished chip, which would allow AMD to further reduce pricing/stabilize pricing while introducing a new product generation to tide users over until Navi is finally ready.Adding to all of this (and the included NaCl), a post via Phoronix has been posted which speaks of a new Polaris Device ID (0x6FDF) that's being added to the latest AMDGPU Linux kernel patch. The new device ID is being added under the "POLARIS 10" family, which includes the Polaris 20 revision. We'll see how this pans out, but if AMD are to in fact revise their Polaris architecture for the 12 nm node, some architectural changes likely wouldn't go wrong to extract maximum value out of that investment.