Speaking with VentureBeat on Friday, Raja Koduri had the following to say:

"Our guiding principle for the Polaris architecture was power efficiency. We have the new naming scheme for our architectures. It’ll be based on galaxies, star systems, and stars. You’ll see more of this coming in the future. Polaris is the beginning of our journey through space."

Raja also explained that the company has two versions of its new 14nm FinFET GPUs ready to launch by the middle of 2016.

“Both are extremely power efficient. This is Polaris 10 and that’s Polaris 11. In terms of what we’ve done at the high level, it’s our most revolutionary jump in performance so far. We’ve redesigned many blocks in our cores. We’ve redesigned the main processor, a new geometry processor, a completely new fourth-generation Graphics Core Next with a very high increase in performance. We have new multimedia cores, a new display engine.”

AMD’s Polaris family officially marks the beginning of the company’s journey into the great vastness of space. As Andy Weir, author of The Martian says, “Astronauts are inherently insane. And really noble.” Perhaps the same can be said for ambitious GPU architects in the next couple years to come.