AMD Polaris architecture – GCN 4.0

Mauller · 14 Apr 2016 at 18:21

bru said:
At 2*Per/W it sounds to me like your expecting twice the performance and half the power, it's one or the other you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

uArch improvements, finfet and shrink. Same number of shaders can have better performance at lower power.

TonyTurbo78 · 14 Apr 2016 at 18:51

Power this power that....just give me a card twice the performance no matter what the power is.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 14 Apr 2016 at 19:47

That means if Vega has a 250w TDP and also uses HBM2 it is going to destroy Fiji.

Edit!!

Just looked at TPU,if the R9 480 is R9 380X level pricing and is only R9 390 level performance it will be 50% faster at 1080P.

bfar · 14 Apr 2016 at 20:13

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
Just looked at TPU,if the R9 480 is R9 380X level pricing and is only R9 390 level performance it will be 50% faster at 1080P.

The TPU is unreal, especially considering how well GCN is doing in DX12 benchmarks. These could be very compelling products. I'd love to know where the 490 is, and where it's positioned price performance.

FoxEye · 14 Apr 2016 at 20:45

TPU being...?

Orangey · 14 Apr 2016 at 21:11

Can't wait for all the backpedalling from the hypers in a couple of months' time.

Polaris will be weak and all these magical stacking speedups will fail to materialise, as usual.

Vish Petrol · 14 Apr 2016 at 21:30

LoadsaMoney said:
No 490 then, or will that be Vega, or will there not be a one, and Vega will be a named like Fury ?

Theres a theory that the Vega cards will be named as the "Rage" series

Lokken86 · 14 Apr 2016 at 21:53

Orangey said:
Can't wait for all the backpedalling from the hypers in a couple of months' time.

Polaris will be weak and all these magical stacking speedups will fail to materialise, as usual.

Probably.

SimBy · 14 Apr 2016 at 21:53

Orangey said:
Can't wait for all the backpedalling from the hypers in a couple of months' time.

Polaris will be weak and all these magical stacking speedups will fail to materialise, as usual.

It's definitely not gonna be Fury X killer that's for sure.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 14 Apr 2016 at 22:21

FoxEye said:
TPU being...?

Techpowerup.

SimBy said:
It's definitely not gonna be Fury X killer that's for sure.

I pretty much said yonks ago it would probably be around R9 390/R9 390X level at a lower price and TDP. After all the AMD statements about affordable VR kind of support that level of performance,since OR and HTC consider the R9 390/GTX970 as the minimum spec VR cards for a reasonable experience.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 14 Apr 2016 at 22:42

Some more details:

https://translate.google.co.uk/tran...4-mhz-und-neuer-stromsparfunktion/&edit-text=

Our resourceful users Bomby has found some interesting information about AMD's upcoming Polaris graphics cards. In the mailing list to AMD's Linux graphics driver an employee has submitted code, the first support for the Polaris family to offer. In it you will find some interesting information.

Firstly, it is confirmed that the next AMD graphics cards can display 16 bits per color channel. Thus, the Polaris-graphics cards may also be suitable for demanding applications. Furthermore you can find information to RAM. In Ellesmere 8 channels and 8 banks of 32 bits can be specified, Baffin is designed to provide only 4 channels, but can be fitted with 8 banks. From the specifications can be seen that AMD will initially continue to rely on GDDR5 memory. With four channels logically produces a 256-bit memory interface, eight channels of 512 bits. In both cases, a maximum memory configuration of 8 GiB GDDR5. As maximum clock a very high value of 6000 MHz is specified in each case. This corresponds to the effective clock speed of the GDDR5 memory and is already in models like AMD's Radeon R9 380 or GeForce GTX see 960th To what extent the currently specified maximum clock speed of 1154 MHz, which is valid for both chips, is also so incorporated into the series remains to be seen. At first engineering samples (prototypes) most other clock rates than the series production apply.

Furthermore Baffin is probably up to 5 displays and Ellesmere those able to control. 6 In another post Alex Deucher writes something to a new power saving mechanism which once shall represent only Baffin available. It looks like AMD has in the new GCN generation Powergating for individual CUs (Compute Units), which bundle multiple shaders. This feature is likely to find some friends especially in the mobile segment. By adjusting the active computing cluster, the energy consumption control well and extend the battery life.

So looks like the GPU can run upto 1154MHZ and the CUs are powergated too.

SimBy · 14 Apr 2016 at 22:44

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
Techpowerup.

I pretty much said yonks ago it would probably be around R9 390/R9 390X level at a lower price and TDP. After all the AMD statements about affordable VR kind of support that level of performance,since OR and HTC consider the R9 390/GTX970 as the minimum spec VR cards for a reasonable experience.

Agree. The only unknown being how much lower are they going. And I'm guessing it will be a lot. They will probably drop Nano, Fury and Fury X prices as well so they don't have a huge price gap.

Mauller · 14 Apr 2016 at 22:55

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
Some more details:

https://translate.google.co.uk/tran...4-mhz-und-neuer-stromsparfunktion/&edit-text=

So looks like the GPU can run upto 1154MHZ and the CUs are powergated too.

I pulled all of that info from the open driver commit and posted a few pages back. Ellesmere also has power-gating support on the CU's but it is not fully implemented yet in the open drivers.

tavtavtav · 15 Apr 2016 at 00:15

kadath said:
No way a 2.5x improvement.

Maybe not quite 2.5x

With the node shrink however nvidia seems by calculations to be getting a 1.88x improvement for gp 100. This is seen to be disappointing to some and it is also seems/ is reportrd that the 14nm Samsung GloFlo process is doing far better than the 16nm Finfet TSMC process.

You also have to consider that AMD at 28nm were less efficient than maxwell, and GCN 1.4 architectural improvements may have have levelled the gap or even conceivably beaten maxwells efficiency.

When all this is considered, the efficiency claims they've gained do not sound too far fetch or excessively exaggerated.

Boomstick777 · 15 Apr 2016 at 00:38

Overlag said:
Overlag said:

AMD release an 8 core Zen, with 2048 shader GPU onboard and 8gb HBM2 as shared memory... We can only dream.

Click to expand...

Would love this, much lower over all power use. Tiny cases etc, this will be the future eventually. The future is fusion

JediFragger said:
Didn't I read something like this 8 years ago??

Yeah but aren't we living it now? Things like the PS4, Xbox One use an all in one AMD chip, mobile, tablet etc use all in one SOC from various sources. The future was fusion and now we are living in it lol.

Desktop PC will likely be the last to take on mainstream all in one chips, but it will happen eventually, the appeal of a low power all in one chip that can actually game is not lost on me.

TheMorningStar · 15 Apr 2016 at 00:56

Kinda wondering if I'll be upgrading this year at all at this rate. Really wanted something notably more powerful than the FuryX to run FPS at very high refresh rates@1440p/Eyefinity and it looks like I'm not getting that unless I crossfire, which I'm not opposed to but not really wanting to do that at the mid-high segment so much.

Toss3 · 15 Apr 2016 at 08:14

So, we're basically just going to be seeing semi-high-end cards from Nvidia this summer (GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, and maybe even the GTX 1080 Ti)? Nvidia's pricing is going to be insane.

Nelly · 15 Apr 2016 at 15:06

Probally been mentioned before, but I can't be bothered to read through all the pages in this thread, so sorry if it's already been mentioned.

Techpowerup | Posted: 15th April 2016 said:
AMD to Launch Radeon R7 470 and R9 480 at Computex

Computex 2016 could see some major consumer graphics action, with AMD reportedly planning to launch two mid-thru-performance segment products on the sidelines of the event - the Radeon R7 470, based on the 14 nm "Baffin" (Polaris 11) silicon, and the Radeon R9 480, based on the 14 nm "Ellesmere" (Polaris 10) silicon. The R7 470 could succeed the R7 370 series in not just performance, but also offer a leap in energy efficiency, with a TDP of less than 50W. The R9 480, on the other hand, could feature a TDP of just 110-135W (R9 380 is rated at 190W).

The R9 480, based on the "Ellesmere" (Polaris 10) is shaping up to be a particularly interesting silicon. It's rumored to feature 2,304 stream processors based on the 4th generation Graphics CoreNext architecture, with 2,560 stream processors being physically present on the chip; and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 (GDDR5X-ready) memory controller. 8 GB could be the standard memory amount. AMD could keep the clock speeds relatively low, with 800-1050 MHz GPU clocks. Imagine R9 390-like performance at half its power-draw.

Source

muziqaz · 15 Apr 2016 at 15:20

Nelly said:
Probally been mentioned before, but I can't be bothered to read through all the pages in this thread, so sorry if it's already been mentioned.

Source

800-1050Mhz. **** it crank that baby up to nine thousand and see what it can do

Either way replacing 390 would make sense, as they are one of the top sellers. And with power consumption cut in half it would be a killer product. Though I would hope it would perform similar to 390x

Killer7xx · 15 Apr 2016 at 15:25

AMD did say Polaris would have a 2-2.5x increase in perf/W, so wouldn't that put the R9 480 or 480X at around R9 Nano or R9 Fury levels of perf? I'm not expecting them to be that powerful, but it would really shake things up in the industry if they managed it.