The LinkedIn profile of an R&D manager at AMD discloses key details of the company's upcoming "Greenland" graphics processor, which is also codenamed Vega10. Slated for an early-2017 launch, according to AMD's GPU architecture roadmap, "Greenland" will be built on AMD's "Vega" GPU architecture, which succeeds even the "Polaris" architecture, which is slated for later this year.

The LinkedIn profile of Yu Zheng, an R&D manager at AMD (now redacted), screencaptured by 3DCenter.org, reveals the "shader processor" (stream processor) count of Vega10 to be 4,096. This may look identical to the SP count of "Fiji," but one must take into account "Greenland" being two generations of Graphics CoreNext tech ahead of "Fiji," and that the roadmap slide hints at HBM2 memory, which could be faster. One must take into account AMD's claims of a 2.5X leap in performance-per-Watt over the current architecture with Polaris, so Vega could only be even faster.

It has been confirmed that Samsung will be AMD's foundry partner for its next generation GPUs. It has been reported that AMD's upcoming "Arctic Islands" family of GPUs could be built on the 14 nanometer FinFET LPP (low-power Plus) process. AMD's rival NVIDIA, meanwhile, is building its next-gen "Pascal" GPU family on 16 nanometer FinFET node, likely at its traditional foundry partner TSMC.

It gets better - not only will Samsung manufacture AMD's next-gen GPUs, but also its upcoming "Zen" family of CPUs, at least a portion of it. AMD is looking to distribute manufacturing loads between two foundries, Samsung and GlobalFoundries, perhaps to ensure that foundry-level teething trouble doesn't throw its product launch cycle off the rails. One of the most talked about "Arctic Islands" GPUs is codenamed "Greenland," likely a successor to "Fiji." Sales of some of the first chips - GPUs or CPUs - made at Samsung, will begin some time in Q3 2016. Some of the other clients for Samsung's 14 nm FinFET node are Apple and Qualcomm. The company plans to speed up development of its more advanced 10 nm node to some time in 2017.

AMD's next-generation GPU family, which it plans to launch some time in 2016, codenamed "Arctic Islands," will see the company skip the 20 nanometer silicon fab process from 28 nm, and jump straight to 14 nm FinFET. Whether the company will stick with TSMC, which is seeing crippling hurdles to implement its 20 nm node for GPU vendors; or hire a new fab, remains to be seen. Intel and Samsung are currently the only fabs with 14 nm nodes that have attained production capacity. Intel is manufacturing its Core "Broadwell" CPUs, while Samsung is manufacturing its Exynos 7 (refresh) SoCs. Intel's joint-venture with Micron Technology, IMFlash, is manufacturing NAND flash chips on 14 nm.

Named after islands in the Arctic circle, and a possible hint at the low TDP of the chips, benefiting from 14 nm, "Arctic Islands" will be led by "Greenland," a large GPU that will implement the company's most advanced stream processor design, and implement HBM2 memory, which offers 57% higher memory bandwidth at just 48% the power consumption of GDDR5. Korean memory manufacturer SK Hynix is ready with its HBM2 chip designs.