AMD Polaris architecture – GCN 4.0

Mauller · 26 Mar 2016 at 14:50

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
It could,but I can see Polaris doing much better with tessellation and at lower resolutions in DX11 games,and things like minimums being improved too.

If they can get faster than Fury X performance from such a small chip,I would be impressed.

Edit!!

The improved command processor and the primitive discard hardware would be what I am looking at.

The instruction prefetching and greater L1 and L2 cache should casue a lot of the shader performance improvements. The improved commander processor should improve Shader Utilisation, so more of the shaders on the die are actually being used without needing Async as often.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 26 Mar 2016 at 15:25

Mauller said:
The instruction prefetching and greater L1 and L2 cache should casue a lot of the shader performance improvements. The improved commander processor should improve Shader Utilisation, so more of the shaders on the die are actually being used without needing Async as often.

The main problem is that Nvidia and AMD went with 600MM2 GPUs last generation which had stripped out DP performance,so unlike in the past it might be not so easy for a smallish GPU to be able to be faster IMHO.

Personally I think AMD are going to go for price/performance with Polaris rather than absolute performance just like the HD3000 and HD4000 series.

So,a Polaris 10 with R9 390X/Fury/Fury Nano/GTX980 level performance for around £200 to £250 in a small compact graphics card. Outside special deals that will be £300 to £400 card performance in something cheaper and with less power consumption,more consistent performance and an updated feature set.

Also,I expect the Polaris cards to be cheaper to make,and have much less power consumption than the previous AMD cards meaning more likelihood of OEM sales in laptops and prebuilt desktops.

Nvidia engineered Maxwell in such a way it meant they could replace the entire Kepler stack with cheaper to make cards and it has paid dividends for them in OEM sales.

Unless,Nvidia is releasing a large Pascal this year,I suspect they will go for a smaller die too,around 300MM2 and aim for GTX980TI level performance,but will then price it at £350 to £400 which is £100 to £150 cheaper than a GTX980TI.

OFC,I could be entirely wrong!

Mauller · 26 Mar 2016 at 15:34

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The main problem is that Nvidia and AMD went with 600MM2 GPUs last generation which had stripped out DP performance,so unlike in the past it might be not so easy for a smallish GPU to be able to be faster IMHO.

Fiji can support 1/2 DP in hardware with how GCN performs DP. But like with Tahiti and Hawaii it is disabled on consumer drivers. Nvidia literally stripped out dedicated DP hardware with maxwell.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 26 Mar 2016 at 16:01

Mauller said:
Fiji can support 1/2 DP in hardware with how GCN performs DP. But like with Tahiti and Hawaii it is disabled on consumer drivers. Nvidia literally stripped out dedicated DP hardware with maxwell.

Ah,OK but still AMD tends to not produce such large GPUs usually,so I think it is a little unfair on a 232MM2 Polaris 10 GPU to be able to trash it!!

Mauller · 26 Mar 2016 at 17:19

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
Ah,OK but still AMD tends to not produce such large GPUs usually,so I think it is a little unfair on a 232MM2 Polaris 10 GPU to be able to trash it!!

TBH i think it is brilliant if it does, especially if it has far fewer shaders at the same time. It means AMD can produce the parts at a lower price point. Fiji is very expensive for them to make atm, they are probably losing money on it with bringing up the entire production process to speed for VEGA.

One other thing if they follow on from the pro duo parts, is using just inductors in the power phase for the gpu, getting rid of coil whine for good.

Bit of the stuff from capsaicin is right then it should be smaller cards with fewer parts, making them cheaper.

pmc25 · 26 Mar 2016 at 20:10

Mauller said:
TBH i think it is brilliant if it does, especially if it has far fewer shaders at the same time. It means AMD can produce the parts at a lower price point. Fiji is very expensive for them to make atm, they are probably losing money on it with bringing up the entire production process to speed for VEGA.

One other thing if they follow on from the pro duo parts, is using just inductors in the power phase for the gpu, getting rid of coil whine for good.

Bit of the stuff from capsaicin is right then it should be smaller cards with fewer parts, making them cheaper.

Surely that won't be the case for p10 and p11 as they're gddr5 ... inductor only would need to be bigger hbm1 polaris, or hbm2 vega.

Mauller · 26 Mar 2016 at 20:34

Adding some credence to Vega having the same number of shaders as Fiji.

http://videocardz.com/58665/amds-greenlandvega-10-gpu-to-feature-4096-stream-processors

Graphics IP V8.0 is Polaris, it is even labelled as that in the open source driver commits.

muziqaz · 26 Mar 2016 at 20:56

Mauller said:
Adding some credence to Vega having the same number of shaders as Fiji.

http://videocardz.com/58665/amds-greenlandvega-10-gpu-to-feature-4096-stream-processors

Graphics IP V8.0 is Polaris, it is even labelled as that in the open source driver commits.

Yeah, polaris10 which was shown to run hitman at above 60fps at 1440p is listed there as 3.7tflops chip with 800mhz core clock

and 192bit mem controller. Real classy.

On the other hand, are AMD employees complete monkeys sharing their work stuff on LinkedIn before that project is finished. One part of AMD keels everything secret and some donkey post most of the stuff in social site

I do believe they have NDA signed and all these social site reveals are breaking those NDAs

Mauller · 26 Mar 2016 at 21:13

muziqaz said:
Yeah, polaris10 which was shown to run hitman at above 60fps at 1440p is listed there as 3.7tflops chip with 800mhz core clock and 192bit mem controller. Real classy.

On the other hand, are AMD employees complete monkeys sharing their work stuff on LinkedIn before that project is finished. One part of AMD keels everything secret and some donkey post most of the stuff in social site
I do believe they have NDA signed and all these social site reveals are breaking those NDAs

Yeah, some of that is from the sisoft leak which must have been running a cut down engineering sample. from the driver information the stock clocks should be 1152. no boost info given though but i reckon amd will more than likely implement a more Nvidia style boost with variable max boost frequency.

But with GCN 4.0 cores, the vega part with the same number of shaders will have far greater performance.

muziqaz · 26 Mar 2016 at 21:23

Mauller said:
Yeah, some of that is from the sisoft leak which must have been running a cut down engineering sample. from the driver information the stock clocks should be 1152. no boost info given though but i reckon amd will more than likely implement a more Nvidia style boost with variable max boost frequency.

But with GCN 4.0 cores, the vega part with the same number of shaders will have far greater performance.

Yeah, I'm not really worried about shader count, as I believe AMD had enough time to tweak GCN a lot. Technologically AMD never disappoint(except CPUs), just execution is kinda hard on them

Mauller · 27 Mar 2016 at 12:17

muziqaz said:
Yeah, I'm not really worried about shader count, as I believe AMD had enough time to tweak GCN a lot. Technologically AMD never disappoint(except CPUs), just execution is kinda hard on them

Yeah, It is unfortunate that bulldozer was AMD's Netburst. But with the zen rumours as having it matching or slightly exceeding Broadwell in IPC then i think they have a winner.

Especially if AMD keep SMT on all of their parts, we might see Nvidia changing their lineup. Since why would people buy a 4core i5 when you can get a 4core AMD with SMT for the same if not less?

But it looks like Vega will use a further improved GCN architecture as it is being stated as Graphics Core Version 9.

But even with Polaris sharing the same graphics core metric as fiji and tonga, it doesnt mean that it will lack DX12.1 features etc. Considering there are some major uArch improvements. It is more than likely that at the front end the driver just treats it similar to a fiji or tonga part for the code path.

muziqaz · 27 Mar 2016 at 13:04

If AMD has sorted out full dx12 feature set we will hear it very soon about it.

flopper · 28 Mar 2016 at 12:14

muziqaz said:
Yeah, I'm not really worried about shader count, as I believe AMD had enough time to tweak GCN a lot. Technologically AMD never disappoint(except CPUs), just execution is kinda hard on them

you do know that AMD had the best CPU in the world not long ago?
Intel did a load of bad stuff that they then had to pay billion dollar fine to AMD...due to bad ethics....much like you know some other brand does to you as a consumer...

Zen be great.
Polaris will shine its light on the processor.
Fast, light and it seems like the second coming of christ

Mauller · 28 Mar 2016 at 14:56

flopper said:
you do know that AMD had the best CPU in the world not long ago?
Intel did a load of bad stuff that they then had to pay billion dollar fine to AMD...due to bad ethics....much like you know some other brand does to you as a consumer...

Zen be great.
Polaris will shine its light on the processor.
Fast, light and it seems like the second coming of christ

The people who downplay how Intel greatly impeded AMD need a reality check. They lost a lot of possible market share, like yeah certain choices in the past have not helped but all of those possible sale and gain in reputation would have been far more R&D money in the bag compared to that tiny billion dollar fine.

AMD are still impeded to this day by a lot of that, hopefully Zen will get them back into the CPU market. And from the looks of things there is a lot of interest in big data as a lot of companies are fed-up with Intel.

elrasho · 28 Mar 2016 at 15:50

I really do hope the ones coming out in summer will be significantly better than my 970 so I can upgrade to a freesync 1440p monitor at the same time

muziqaz · 28 Mar 2016 at 16:06

elrasho said:
I really do hope the ones coming out in summer will be significantly better than my 970 so I can upgrade to a freesync 1440p monitor at the same time

Yes they will be

Relentless81 · 28 Mar 2016 at 16:10

elrasho said:
I really do hope the ones coming out in summer will be significantly better than my 970 so I can upgrade to a freesync 1440p monitor at the same time

This is my plan too, really hoping for a cool, quiet upper mid range card for 1440p and 100+ hz

I'm hoping Polaris 10 will deliver on that for around £300, £350 max

elrasho · 28 Mar 2016 at 16:20

Relentless81 said:
This is my plan too, really hoping for a cool, quiet upper mid range card for 1440p and 100+ hz

I'm hoping Polaris 10 will deliver on that for around £300, £350 max

Exactly my thoughts. Not sure which monitor I'd get but that can wait until the reviews for the GPU are out.

JediFragger · 28 Mar 2016 at 16:27

elrasho said:
I really do hope the ones coming out in summer will be significantly better than my 970 so I can upgrade to a freesync 1440p monitor at the same time

Just make sure it has a good range when you do, some **** ones out there

Relentless81 · 28 Mar 2016 at 17:41

Yeah the monitor is tricky, nothing out at the moment that I really want unless you fancy playing the not very much fun at all panel lottery game