New AMD roadmap gives more insight in polaris 10 and 11
A new roadmap appeared online from AMD, in this roadmap you can spot some plans and positioning for the future graphics cards based on the Polaris 10 and 11 GPU design. The roadmap also makes it pretty clear that there will be no rebrands.
The new slide shows product positioning of Polaris and confirms that Polaris 11 will be a more mainstream model with the Polaris 10 to be a high-end SKU series. Polaris 10 is "Ellesmere" and Polaris 11 is "Baffin.
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.
The 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 10 | AMD 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 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.
Please click the thumbnail below to see the new roadmap slide.
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I was also expecting much higher clock speeds this time out.
Perhaps AMD want to make good on that Overclockers Dream thing they mentioned a while back lol
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I was also expecting much higher clock speeds this time out.
Perhaps AMD want to make good on that Overclockers Dream thing they mentioned a while back lol
Both companies should just release a card at 1mhz. "THE BEST OVERCLOCKER EVER!!!11!1"
Fox2232, you think it's an architecture design choice by AMD, or a limit of the 14nm node?
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That core clock has to be so it can fit in SFFs like the X51, AMD quantum thinget etc...
Kinda annoyed that Pascal 104 will surpass Polaris 10, but whatever.
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That core clock has to be so it can fit in SFFs like the X51, AMD quantum thinget etc...
Kinda annoyed that Pascal 104 will surpass Polaris 10, but whatever.
not certain, but yeah... it proly will, hopefully not by much
AMD can still win if they have truly competitive product.
Small dies and perf/mm2 has always been their bread and butter.
One thing they clearly did good this gen is Polaris 11 and focus on mobile graphics. JChrist... finally!
GCN/7970 (paper) launch, with no mobile in sight was a disaster.
But Nvidia now late with mobile? Whats going on? Waiting on.. Intel, or what..?
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cmiiw but from what i know, the logic when designing a chip is not how to make it run at higher speed (more ghz is not always means better)
but instead how to run more efficiently
if i can use cpu as example, pentium4@4ghz vs skylake@2ghz... skylake should win because it have more cores and intruction per cycle
anyway what matter is real performance ...
they can wrote spec like double or even triple from current lineup, but if performance increase only like 10% up then its means nothing
And that's the thing. While GCN is more efficient than Maxwell if we take: performance / (transistor*clock)
Maxwell clocks higher ultimately allowing smaller (cheaper to make chip) perform competitively or even better than AMD competitor.
As people are used to 150~250W cards, nVidia will target this range. And if power efficiency from 16nm allows them to clock above 1.5GHz... Then they can deliver adequate performance through use of higher clock on smaller (cheaper to make) chip.
But if AMD can't clock GCN that high even on 14nm, then you get your power efficient chips which will require more transistors to compete with pascal's higher clock. (GCN will be more expensive to make.)
And that either means much higher profits for nVidia as AMD can't undercut them or very low profits for AMD. Either way, as you get more than double power efficiency and PCIe standard says 300W top, then we should expect cards to be clocked as high as TDP/chip design allows.