AMD Radeon R9 480 perf is Close to R9 390X

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Interesting, some new info on Polaris surfaced and some early performance has surfaced. It seems that the AMD Radeon R9 480 (the non X model) would be performing close to the Radeon R9 390X. Which is pretty significant performance for an model in that range.



Some performance numbers spotted at an GFXBench run make a rather stong and compelling arguement for the R9 480 (non-X) as it is close to Radeon R9 390X performance. However, it is only OpenGL stuff that is being listed. So that makes it a little harder to judge. The new Polaris based GPUs are based on the new and energy efficient 14nm FinFET process.

We think it is safe to say that Polaris 10 will be the R9 490X series with 490 and 480 models (high-end). Polaris 11 will be the GPU replacing the 370 and 360 products, likely R7 470 and R9 470. It is unlikely that AMD will announce all products at once, so we expect Polaris 10 appear first around the Computex timeframe with an official launch later. Polaris introduces HVEC (h.265) decode and encode hardware-acceleration and will also support the latest display output standards like DisplayPort 1.3 (how does 3840x2160 @ 120Hz and 1920x1080 @ 480Hz sound?) and of course, HDMI 2.0.

A roadmap also confirms that the Vega architecture is to be released in 2017. Vega will het HBM2 memory and the successor to the current (enthusiast) Fury models. Later on in 2018 the NAVI architecture will be released, positioned with 'next-gen' memory.

In a recent find AMD Polaris 11 was spotted, Device ID 67FF:C8 codenamed “Goose”. This would be the base GPU for a several entry-level products. Now, the CompuBench database reports back that this device has 16 CUs with a maximum clock frequency of 1000 MHz. Multiple your CUs (compute units) by the number of shader processors per cluster (assuming that AMD keeps 64 per cluster) and you'll notice that Polaris 11 in this configuration has 1024 Shader processors tied to a 128-bit bus and 2048 MB of memory.

Polaris 10, codenamed "Ellesmere," would then feature over 2304 stream processors (36 CUs); and Vega 10 featuring 4096 stream processors, with 64 CUs. Things could end up looking like this:

AMD Polaris / Vega GPU Specs (rumored)
AMD Vega 10AMD Polaris 10 AMD Polaris 11 (Dev_ID 67FF)
GPU Vega 10 / Greenland Polaris 10 / Ellesmere Polaris 11 / Baffin
Positioning Enthusiast High-end Mainstream
Fabrication Process 14nm FinFET 14nm FinFET 14nm FinFET
Compute Units 64 36 16
Stream Processors 4096 2304 / 2560 1024 / 1280
Computing Power ~8.2 TFLOPs ~3.7 TFLOPs ~ 2.0 TFLOPs
Core clock ~1000 MHz ~800 MHz ~1000 MHz
Effective Memory Clock ~2000 MHz ~6000 MHz ~7000 MHz
Memory Bus 4096-bit 256-bit 128-bit
Memory 16GB HBM2 8GB GDDR5(x) 2GB GDDR5
Bandwidth 1024 GB/s 192 / 384 GB/s 112 GB/s
Launch Date  2017 Q2 2016 Q2 2016

Mind you that the specs shown in the the recent findings of a CompuBench database might not be the full unlocked GPUs, so the CU numbers might even be higher. Which makes this news-item very speculative. We are inclined to say that Polaris 10 really would get 2560 shader processors.

The R9 480 under device ID AMD 67DF:C4 can be spotted from that link. The Radeon R9 380 sits in the 225 USD range, so if the 480 would be priced similar, then that would be quite something. Have a peek for yourself:


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