Leaked benchmarks for AMD Radeon RX 480 hits minimum VR spec for $199

[JEMC]

shikamaru317 said:

JEMC said:

Why are you assiming that there will be 3 Vega cards? The speculation around those chips talk about Vega 10 & 11 (likely because of the Polaris 10 & 11 codenames). With that in mind, AMD could use Vega 11 with a 384 or 512bit bus and GDDR5X memory as the RX 490, and leave the big Vega 10 chip with HBM2 as the new Fury card.

One thing that could give this idea more ground are the rumors about AMD trying to launch Vega earlier when at GDC they mentioned the high costs of HBM 2 as one of the reasons to not launch it until 2017. They could prioritize the development of the smaller Vega chip with "cheap" GDDR5X memory to try to compete with Nvidia's current high end cards.

Just speculating based on the previous gen, where there was 390 and 2 main Fury cards, as well as the fact that AMD will probably want 3 competitors for 1070, 1080, and 1080 ti respectively. While there are only 2 Vega chips in production as you said, there is room for a cut-down version of the bigger Vega chip imo. 

Last gen AMD had way too many cards on the market, with Fury, R9 Nano and R9 390X, for example, basically competed against each other. AMD would be stupid to make the same mistake again.

But I agree with you that between the 2304 SPs of the 480 and the rumored 4096 SPs of the full Vega chip, there's enough room for another two cards with 2816 and 3584 SPs respectively (those are the specs of the 390X and Fury).