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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Eden-K121D - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
Nah that will be veag based otherwise polaris architecture based semi-custom SOC's wont be able to do 4K 60FPS with 6 Tflops of performance as Phil Spencer mentioned. ANother thing though XBOX scorpio might come with 12 GB GDDR5X ramboozed - Wednesday, June 15, 2016 - link
What's all this "z-height" nonsense. What happened to "thickness"?mateau - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
ANANDTECH is completely missing the big story about AMD's RX 480.RX 470 and 460 are for folks who want better performance but can't afford RX 480.
And that is an addressable market of hundreds of millions of folks.
But that is NOT the big story.
What is huge is AMD has released a SCALABLE graphics add in board with RX 480.
For $199.99 you get better than Fury X performance.
Buy two and spend $399.98 and you get better than GTX 1080 performance.
In fact 2x RX 480 in Crossfire mode CRUSHES GTX 1080 in AOTS DX12 benchmarks.
Who cares about DX11? Or DX10 or DX9 for that matter. DX12 is the future of gaming.
Need more performance just bung in another $199.99 RX 480.
NVidia has again screwed over it's customers by cancelling 3-4 way SLI also. NVidia is not supporting scalability.
Buy Radeon and you BUY AMERICAN.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
A scale able architecture? You mean crossfire? Thats been around since the mid 2000s. 2FPS faster is not "crushing" the 1080. 3-4 way GPUS have always scaled poorly, so it is no surprise that nvidia dropped it (and 4 way SLI was never officially supported in the first place).Whatever you are smoking, you might want to drop it for awhile and come back to reality.
Psycho Turkey - Tuesday, June 28, 2016 - link
You have some neck on you coming out with that garbage and expecting anyone to take you seriously.2 fps extra you say? Nearly three years ago I broke an 11 year stint of running solely nvidia gpu's. I went and bought two 290's, flashed them to 290X's and have been running them water cooled and crossfired for nearly 3 years since. The average gain with running a 2nd gpu is well above 90% more fps than with the single gpu in.
I keep seeing muppets like yourself making ridiculous claims about things they have zero experience of and then expecting people to take them seriously. On top of that you then have the gall to ask the guy "what he was smoking"?
You're a f-ing joke mate!
Ammaross - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
An RX480 is more in line with a 390X, not a Fury X.2x RX480s only get a couple FPS more in AOTS DX12 (62ish vs 59).
DX11 is still a major codebase for most gaming engines and will be a couple of years before DX12 is more the norm.
NVidia cancelling 3-4way SLI (which they're not) cuts out the <0.1% of the market that did 3+SLI. DX12 is basically replacing XFire/SLI with explicit multi-adapter. Just like you said, "DX12 is the future of gaming" and thus, antiquated AFR is being phased out for DX12 EMA.
But yes, AMD hitting the mid-to-low end market with the RX480 and down is a smart move. Marketshare and Mindshare is important. They'll have a high-end answer with Vega, but they likely need all the fab wafers they can get right now to keep up with mainstream demand of the new cards. NVidia went the other way and they can't keep their stock up, and not likely due to demand.
Jay77 - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
DirectX 12 might be the future of gaming, but AotS isn't. Until there's a compliant game I'd actually buy, with real money, DX12 is just so much MS fart gas.Let's all morn the loss of 3+ SLI, I'm sure half a dozen people are absolutely inconsolable.
Morawka - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
can't wait to see these in notebooks at super cheap prices.Valantar - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
That second to last slide ("Endnotes") has some interesting tidbits tucked away.-Radeon RX 470 is listed as a "110W" card
-Radeon RX 480M is apparently a fully enabled Polaris 11, with 16 CUs. Roughly the same as RX 460, but clocked lower? Also, >4000 in Fire Strike at 35W system power? Holy sh*t. Even with a dual core 15W i7 (4600), that's amazing. Close to a GTX 960M, but at ... half the power? Less?
DonMiguel85 - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
I consider it a travesty that Anandtech never posted reviews for the GTX 960 and 950, even promising to post one for the former.