AMD’s Post-Navi graphics architecture is rumoured to be codenamed ‘Arcturus’

For the past few years, AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group has been extremely tight-lipped about their graphics card roadmap, leaving all post-Navi graphics hardware without an official codename at this time. 

With the recent restructuring of the Radeon Technologies Group, under the leadership of Mike Rayfield, it is understandable why the group’s future remains unclear, but now we seem to have our first glimpse of AMD’s post-Navi graphics hardware. 

An AMD employee, a Linux driver developer known as ‘bridgman’ on the Phoronix forums, has stated that the company’s latest codename is Arcturus, which lines up perfectly with AMD’s standard ‘stars’ GPU naming scheme. Arcturus is the brightest star in the Boötes constellation, though its name doesn’t have the same marketing potential as shorter names like Vega and Navi. 

‘bridgman’ has also stated that AMD’s future graphics card architecture/marketing names will soon diverge from their codenames, making it harder for product names to be leaked within open source drivers while also giving their marketing teams a little more to work with than the ageing ‘stars’ naming scheme.

Beyond Navi, it is likely that we will see an entirely new naming scheme for Radeon products, something which may prove vital in the post-Navi/”Next-Gen” release timeframe, when Intel is expected to enter the discrete graphics card market.