AMD’s First Polaris GPU may be out in 2 months

AMD’s First Polaris GPU may be out in 2 months

 

*UPDATE* – Ryan Shrout of PCPER has declared that his statement was misunderstood and that the GPU arrived from production in just two months, not that we would be seeing a low end Polaris GPU release in two months. 

 

According to PCPER’s Ryan Shrout the first of AMD’s new Polaris GPUs will be released in as little as two months, with the first GPUs representing the greatest increase in efficiency from AMD but will not be AMD’s highest end model.

If there is one thing that AMD say that Fiji will be it is Efficient, but not all of that is coming from the new 14nm FinFET manufacturing process that they are using, but from a lot of architecture changes from GCN 4.0, AKA Polaris.

Staff from the Radeon Technology Group did admit that the bulk of the efficiency improvements that we will see with AMD’s newest GPUs will come from the so-called “FinFET Advantage”, with PCPER stating that is is “on the order of a 70/30 split”. 

These efficiency advantages gained from the 14nm FinFET processing node will also be coming to Nvidia’s upcoming Pascal products, though at this time we simply have no idea whether or not the TSMC 16nm FinFET process will give them the same gains as they are different processing nodes from different manufacturers. 

 

  

 

In terms of architecture improvements the new Polaris, GCN 4.0, architecture will feature a newly designed command processor, a dedicated multimedia section, a new display engine, updated geometry processors and a updated memory controller and new and improved set of L2 cache, all of which will be instrumental in giving AMD more performance in this upcoming generation of GPUs.

The new command processor will likely help AMD with Asynchronous and serial computing tasks, especially with the new DirectX 12 API, promising that the GPU will never be sitting at idle for too long and the new memory controller will no doubt help AMD make the most out of every bit of available memory bandwidth that they can get their hands on with HBM 2.0, though we do still expect to see some GDDR5 or GDDR5X in the lover end of AMD’s lineup.  

AMD has also stated that they have “uplifted the frequency of the product”, meaning that AMD’s upcoming GPUs will be able to run at higher frequencies than before, so perhaps this will mean that AMD will enter an overclocking golden age or simply just have much better clock speeds out of the box. Perhaps 1250MHz or more on the GPU core. 

 

  

While talking to PCPER AMD’s Joe Macri stated that they expect FinFET to bring a 50-60% drop in power consumption for the same performance or a 25-30% performance boost with the same power consumption, which are both very large numbers to consider. 

With such a large reduction in power consumption at the same level of GPU power AMD will see a drastic improvement in their performance per watt, especially for their mobile products. 

Remember that this was talking about FinFETs alone, so hopefully AMD’s architectural improvements will allow AMD to deliver an even greater increase in GPU performance. 

  

  

AMD may be releasing their first Polaris GPU is just two months, finally delivering a new low power offering to the lower end market. Hopefully AMD’s new products will continue to look this impressive and that AMD will not just deliver some great performing products, but new products that can also be able to compete with Nvidia’s upcoming Pascal series of GPUs. 

 

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