AMD Radeon R7 470 and R9 480 at Computex or E3

Both graphics card manufacturers AMD and Nvidia are gearing up for the new high-end graphics card releases. It looks like we're going to have a busy summer. New rumors on the AMD product launch surfaced as well, this round the Radeon R7 470 and R9 480 are topic of discussion.

The new Polaris based GPUs are based on the new and energy efficient 14nm FinFET process.

Let's break it down:

• Radeon R7 470 - This SKU series will be based on 14 nm "Baffin" (aka Polaris 11), rumored to be a 50 Watt TDP card.
• Radeon R9 480 - This SKU is based on 14 nm "Ellesmere" (aka Polaris 10), rumored to be a ~130 Watt TDP card.

Obviously the avid PC Gamer the R9 480 will be an interesting SKU as rumors right now point to a GPU that holds 2560 shader processors (GCN iteration 4). The R9 480 would get an active 2304 shader processors (leaving room in the GPU for an 480X model.

That means 40 shader processor clusters (each holding 64 SPs):

• 36 x 64 = 2304 (Radeon R9 480 / Polaris 10)
• 40 x 64 = 2560 (Radeon R9 480X / Polaris 10)

We are looking at a 256-bit wide memory bus, yet it is unclear if that'll hold GDDR5 or doubled bandwith with GDDR5X. Polaris 10 is expected to be clocked in the 1 GHz marker on the GPU core frequency.

It is expected that AMD will announce Polaris GPUs on Computex 2016 (May 31-June 4) or even more likely, E3 2016 (June 14-17), more in line with last years release.