Not necessarily. They may require some tweaking, but nothing substantial.
I disagree. Even one engineer working on modifying Polaris to work with 9gbs RAM is one engineer not working on 7nm & Navi.
Let’s be bluntly honest here, AMD was dying and Dr. Su saved it. She focused intently on Ryzen and Navi, giving Vega only an anemic number of engineers. It paid off. Ryzen, while not equal to Intel’s offering in IPC, laid a serious slap down on Intel with total value. Threadripper was a side project, a distraction even, but it produced something unique that has made Intel jump through hoops to come up with a response. It was a profitable distraction that paid off far more than it cost in resources.
Hopefully Navi will be the GPU equivalent of Ryzen, but I doubt it. Nvidia hasn’t been resting on its laurels as much as Intel was. So it’s even more important that she not let the GPU division get distracted. Would a 9gbs RX 590 pay the same kind of dividends that Threadripper did? Not a chance.
IMHO, the only reason we’re even seeing RX 590 is it was an easy change that required the majority of the work to be done by the fab or engineers that weren’t needed for Navi/7nm. The cost in resources was small compared to the benefit gained (benefit can be measured by market share gained
or reducing market share lost.)