A Bit More on AMD’s Polaris GPUs: 36 & 16 CUs
by Ryan Smith on June 15, 2016 8:30 AM EST
Along with this week’s teaser of the forthcoming Radeon RX 470 and RX 460 at E3, AMD also held a short press briefing about Polaris. The bulk of AMD’s presentation is going to be familiar to our readers who keep close tabs on AMD’s market strategy (in a word, VR), but this latest presentation also brought to light a few more details on the company’s two Polaris GPUs that I want to quickly touch upon.
First and foremost, AMD’s presentation included a slide with pictures of the two chips, and confirmation on their full configurations. The larger Polaris 10 is a 36 CU (2304 SP) chip, meaning that the forthcoming Radeon RX 480 video card is using a fully enabled chip. Meanwhile the smaller Polaris 11 (note that these pictures aren’t necessarily to scale) packs 16 CUs (1024 SPs). This puts it a bit below Pitcairn (20 CUs) before factoring in GCN 4’s higher efficiency. Meanwhile as is common for these lower-power GPUs, AMD’s slide also confirms that it features a 128-bit memory bus.
AMD is expecting Polaris 11 to offer over 2 TFLOPs of performance. Assuming a very liberal range of 2.0 to 2.5 TFLOPs for possible shipping products, this would put clockspeeds of a high-end Polaris 11 part at between 975MHz and 1220MHz, which is similar to our projections for RX 480/Polaris 10. Note that AMD has not yet announced any specific product using Polaris 11, however as we now know that RX 470 is a Polaris 10 based card, it’s safe to assume that RX 460 is Polaris 11, and the over-2 TFLOPs projection is for that card.
Second, briefly mentioned in AMD’s press release on Monday was the low z-height of at least Polaris 11, and it pops up in this slide deck again. There was some confusion whether z-height referred to the laptop or the chip, but the slide makes it clear that this is about the chip. So it will be interesting to see how thin Polaris 11 is, how that compares to other chips, and just what manufacturers can in turn do with it.
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johnpombrio - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
AMD as a company is doing terribly. It is on the deathwatch over at Ars and on Forbes. It is hemorrhaging money, just sold off 11% of the company to the Chinese, and its R&D budget is down 30% in less than 3 years. it is hard to be excited for a company in such dire straits.atlantico - Sunday, June 26, 2016 - link
I remember when Apple was on the deathwatch, every week, every month, every year for almost a decade, people were creating clicks by writing negative articles about Apple. Major financial players were asking for liquidation of the company (hi Mike Dell!!) and pundits and internet "experts" alike were just counting down to the demise of Apple.Those who watched Apple closely at that time knew that things were turning around, because unlike a dying company, there was constant development going on, steady releases and interesting things happening.
Dumb proclamations of "chinese owning 11%" of AMD mean nothing. Being on deathwatch means nothing. Budgets mean nothing. Capability, drive and product delivery does.
AMD is still innovating, still making something new and interesting, still delivering those products. AMD is very much alive.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
One of our core rules is that we always adhere to embargoes, and that we never discuss whether we're under embargo or not. We don't do the "I know something you don't know" game because it's disrespectful to our readers, our competition, and the companies we cover. For embargoed information, we'll talk about it if and when the company is ready for us to share it with you.As a result all articles are written from the perspective of the reader, which means this is newly revealed information.
funkforce - Friday, June 17, 2016 - link
Speaking of reviews.Where are the reviews for GTX 960, 950, 1080 or 1070? Every time you've promise "a later day", "next week", "barring further complications" or "personal matters" among a plethora of promises in comment sections or on twitter. Don't you ever feel ashamed that you keep stringing people on for months and months and then just let it come to nothing again and again? Shouldn't an Editor in Chief lead by example? I just feel helpless, you are such a good writer and I've always valued ATs opinion the most. What is going on Ryan? Seriously?
ManuelDiego - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
All other tech sites published their GTX 1080 review on May the 17th. It's June the 15th, 4 full weeks later, and Anandtech hasn't yet published theirs (not to mention the 1070).<ironyON> Will we see a conjoint Pascal/Polaris/Vega review some time this fall? <ironyOFF>
tarqsharq - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
The longer we wait the more and more curious I get as to the contents of the review... or what difficulties have delayed it.stardude82 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I'm still waiting for that GTX 950 review from last summer.TallestJon96 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Stole my joke.It does kind of become ridiculous when websites like Guru3d have reviews for not 1, but 4 different 1080s, plus reviews for the 1070s, but anandtech can't even get one out. Or Gamer's nexus has 1080 and 1070 review, plus a watercooled review for the 1080 and an SLI review for the 1070. Both of these sites use more intensive metrics than average fps and minimum, they use things like frame time graphs and 1% and 0.1% lows.
I was sort of waiting for the 1070 to release so they could review at the same time, then I was waiting to see if they reviewed them when the partner cards were availible for review, amd now I don't know what we are waiting for.
If the Anandtech review blows me away I'll take my complaints back, but I have a feeling the conclusion will be the same: the 1080 is the best graphics card on the market, and the 1070 beats every other graphics cards out there. Buy whichever one you can afford.
Glkjouivnqwe - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
If you're looking for some copy-and-pasted bits from Nvidia PR along with game benchmarks, then Anandtech will never be your go-to place.Does SMP - the vr multi-projection - actually do anything? how well? Who knows? Certainly Guru3d haven't tested any part of it, but they've taken up a good half-a-page regurgitating Nvidia's marketing materials of it.
What about the other buzz-wordy features? The only way to find out is to actually test them. And that takes time. And also drivers with the functionality actually enabled, which may or may not exist yet.
Meteor2 - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
I come to Anandtech mainly for the comments. Well it couldn't be due the reviews, could it? Because there aren't any.