AMD announces Polaris architecture - GCN 4.0

iPwnz

iPwnz

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GPU WARS: THE RED TEAM STRIKES BACK!
AMD announces Polaris architecture - a historic leap in Performance per watt.
AMD will soon be announcing their new Radeon Technologies Polaris Architecture, heralding a new era in power efficiency for AMD, with a core design which is almost completely
changed and being built on a new, highly efficient FinFET Processing
node.
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The new Polaris, GCN 4.0 architecture will feature a newly designed command processor, a dedicated multimedia section, a new display engine, geometry processors and a updated memory controller and set of L2 cache, all of which will be instrumental in giving AMD more performance in this upcoming generation of GPUs.
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AMD's Polaris GPUs are now set for release in Mid 2016, in the same timeframe that Nvidia's next generation GPUs are expected to arrive, meaning that 2016 will no
doubt be a very competitive and exciting time for PC graphics and PC
gaming in general. especially with the immanent release of VR and DirectX12.
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Source

PASCAL Vs POLARIS!
 
Good they renamed it to Polaris, too many ****ing islands all these years.
It's 4th gen but I thought they were calling it either GCN 1.3 or 2.0, the older ones were 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 so it seems weird they'd call this 4.0
One thing I find funny is I'm still on my ancient VX450 which I've used to run at least 4 different cpus along with the 8800GT, 260, 6950, 280 and I also ran a friend's 970 I borrowed for a while last week although I wasn't playing a graphically demanding game.
Components are only getting more efficient every year and at this rate I don't think I'll ever need to change my PSU.
 
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You must've had the older original and better VX450. That small beast could go to 550W i heard but it may not handle stress testing with Furmark/Prime95 that well on high-end components.
If there was a reliable 450-500W PSU like that VX450 with fully modular cables i'd buy it instantly!
 
Yea it's the older one which is why I didn't worry too much about running a 970 off it, too bad they don't make such PSU's anymore.
Stress testing has never been a problem but then I wouldn't risk it now taking capacitor aging into account plus who does stress testing nowadays anyways ? OC'ing is no longer a challenge and there's nothing to put that extra horsepower to use either, as for benchmarks, that's something you stop doing once you turn 15. I have at least 5 friends with ROG boards and only one of em makes full use of the features, rest of em either had too much money or bought it for the e-peen.

Also I've always been a mid-upper mid range guy so I wouldn't know if it'd handle a high end component under extreme loads, the most power hungry cpu I used with it was the 955 BE @ 4.2 for as long as I had it.
In the AMD vid itself they're running a 4790k + Polaris GTX 950 equivalent gpu and it's only drawing 85w from the wall (although the load isn't much either), even with an upper mid-range card you'd be at 200-220w max if you're a single ssd user like me. Jen Hsun had also promised 2x the perf/watt over Maxwell so it's gonna be a good year for the master race.

 
Promises are made to be broken and this just being a PR news makes it even harder to believe it.
 
They won't lie so blatantly in an official vid and neither is it unbelievable since it's a major node shrink going from 28 to 14nm.
If anything it's strange that they chose to compare it to a cut down version of the least efficient card in the Maxwell lineup.
 
Ah my bad. I didn't watch either vid.
Anyway I'm more interested in knowing how and where AMD and Nvidia are going to place these new GPUs (Polaris and Pascal respectively) in the market. How are they going to "phase out" the current line-ups? Price-cut? If yes by how much? And what if the R9 290 something still beats a mid-Polaris and likewise with Nvidia? I know that AMD said performance per watt but what about the price per performance? Not to forget that Indian pricing will be much more than the West.
 
Same as they usually do, ramp down production and get rid of older stocks just in time to launch the new architecture.
As for what price point they'll be hitting first, I think it'll be low and mainstream initially since the high end gpu's from the last gen are still relatively newer products (980Ti, Fury) when compared to the 970 and 290 which are almost 18 months old.
AMD also has ancient parts in the mainstream segment and that video too featured a demo with an entry level gpu which makes it even more probable that they'll be replacing those first.

As for Nvidia, they went on and on about autonomous cars and barely mentioned anything about their gpu's at CES a few hours back, at this point we can only wait and watch.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/4/10...-driving-car-supercomputer-announces-ces-2016
 
Just read the article. What a blunder. I hope this will not be like the 3.5GB GTX970 drama in which AMD took the opportunity to slap nvidia on the ass! :p
 
AMD confirms high-end Polaris GPU will be released in 2016.
The overall target is still "console-class gaming on a thin-and-light notebook."
Wut? This is exactly just the kind of news which make you lose your existing and potential customers.

AMD is working on two versions of its upcoming Polaris graphics architecture: Polaris 10 and Polaris 11.
In an interview with VentureBeat, graphics chief Raja Koduri explained
that one of those GPUs is aimed at thin-and-light laptops and entry-level desktops, while the the other is a larger, high-performance GPU
designed to take back the premium graphics card market currently dominated by rival Nvidia. However, the overall target for Polaris is still "console-class gaming on a thin-and-light notebook." "We have two versions of these FinFET GPUs. Both are extremely power efficient," said Koduri. "This is Polaris 10 and that’s Polaris 11. In terms of what we’ve done at the high level, it's our most revolutionary jump in performance so far. We've redesigned many blocks in our cores. We’ve redesigned the main processor, a new geometry processor, a completely new fourth-generation Graphics Core Next with a very high increase in performance."
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Koduri's comments confirm the company does have a high-end GPU in the works for release this year.
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http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/01/amd-confirms-high-end-polaris-gpu-in-development-for-2016/
 
iPwnz said:
Just read the article. What a blunder. I hope this will not be like the 3.5GB GTX970 drama in which AMD took the opportunity to slap nvidia on the ass! :p
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Blunder or not, it is almost impossible to find decent AMD offerings as of now in New Delhi market. And nVidia still manages to not only sell but sell well in the market.
 
Are you talking about the availability of AMD cards? Could it be because no dealer wants to stock them because of the "nvidia>amd" logic? I came across a similar event a few years ago, i couldn't find some amd processors but Intel were plenty! When asked they told "why are you looking for AMD processors when Intel>AMD?." And a few months ago I met the head of a reputed dealer and even he said similar things on the subject. But well he was kind enough to have a proper debate with me and we checked online for reviews, rankings and benchmarks etc.
Or there might be some other business reason/s which we are not aware of?
 
^ No, that prejudice is common everywhere.

It is just that the latest releases of hardware from the Red Team (especially post R9 rebranding) things have got super hard to source. I rarely see any availability through out the market. Irrespective of brand and price.

There is a grand total of one R9 FURY X available pan-India as far as I am aware and it has been sitting pretty at the SMC store for the past two-three months whilst the GTX980Ti's / GTX980's and GTX970's around it are culled every few weeks.
 
iPwnz said:
Are you talking about the availability of AMD cards? Could it be because no dealer wants to stock them because of the "nvidia>amd" logic? I came across a similar event a few years ago, i couldn't find some amd processors but Intel were plenty! When asked they told "why are you looking for AMD processors when Intel>AMD?." And a few months ago I met the head of a reputed dealer and even he said similar things on the subject. But well he was kind enough to have a proper debate with me and we checked online for reviews, rankings and benchmarks etc.
Or there might be some other business reason/s which we are not aware of?
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More like the current gen AMD GPU's have low availability or not selling well at the moment and hence nobody has them in stock. I have always seen ATi/AMD GPU's being more accessible in the market compared to nVidia for a long time. 1800/1900XT series, HD4xxx series, HD5xxx series, HD6xxx series, HD7xxx series were all more easily available and at reasonable prices than the nVidia counterparts.

Even the ATI R200 (Radeon 8xxx and 9xxx) series were more easily available in the market than the competing nvidia Geforce4 and later series. It was after GeForce 6xxx that nVidia GPU's were more easily available.

I had to back order my nVidia GPU purchases from other cities and wait for them while all of my ATI/AMD purchases in India were all immediate purchases with ready availability.
 
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