Discussion: Polaris, AMD's 4th Gen GCN Architecture

[TechyInAZ]

AMD's next generation of GPUs is on the horizion, codenamed Polaris. These GPUs will not only increase performance from previous generations of GCN chips, they will be redone inside and out with brand new manufacturing processes and loads of featues.

Performance and Power Savings:

According to data I've gathered, Polaris isn't going to be faster than Maxwell. But it will be equal to Maxwell with a slight boost in another arena, power savings. As it turns out, AMD already has demos of it's new Polaris cards, which were shown demoed against the GTX 950. Both GPUs were playing Battefront at identical settings and identical frame rates of 60fps, but AMD's Polaris GPU was only consuming half of the wattage of the GTX 950 (60W).

You might argue that the GTX 750 ti should of been tested, since it can still do 1080P at very good settings in todays games. However, keep in mind that the GTX 950 is extremely close to the GTX 960 in performance. So for an AMD GPU to have nearly equal GTX 960 performance but with the same wattage of a GTX 750 ti is AMAZING for AMD.


Features:

Polaris is aimed at nearly all tech users, from the humble and lowly budget laptop for streaming youtube, all the way to extreme gaming with virtual reality.

1) Encoding: Polaris plans to support the new H.265 encode/decode allowing faster acceleration processing for video editing, video rendering, video streaming etc.

2)Display Outs: Polaris will officially support the new Displayport 1.3 and HDMI 2.0. DP 1.3 is capable of pumping out 60hz at 5k resolutions while HDMI 2.0 is capable of pumping out 4k at 60hz.

3)Virtual Reality: This is one of the top priority goals for AMD. AMD plans on making their top end cards capable of virtual reality gaming well above the minimum requirements set for VR.

4) HBM: High Bandwidth Memory is going to be standard in at least half of AMD's GPU lineup. HBM is a huge leap in VRAM technology, allowing to be 9x faster than it's predecessor GDDR5.

FinFET

AMD is going to be the next manufactuer that will produce it's GPUs with the newer FinFET transistors.

Currently, AMD has been using Planar built transistors for it's 3rd gen GCN GPUs. While Planar's transistors work fine with the 28nm process, trying to shrink it to 16nm is causing leakage problems for AMD.

FinFET uses far better materials for it's transistors, allowing AMD to shrink to 16nm and below without the current leaking issues Planar is giving them.

Release Date:

The current release date is mid 2016. But as it always is with GPU manufacturers, AMD will only be producing two of it's GPUs at launch then finish off the lineup as the months go by.

Instead of going top to down like Nvidia did with Maxwell, AMD will start off at launch by producing it's budget oriented cards called Polaris 10. Then by the end of 2016 to 2017 AMD will release it's high end Polaris 11 GPUs.


As usual, please feel free to discuss this topic!
TechyInAZ

 

[Robert Cook]

What is the word with Polaris suddenly not being the flagship? does this mean a furyX re brand, or a wait for Vega?

 

[Sakkura]

For people confused about "4th gen GCN", the old names like GCN 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 etc. were strictly unofficial, the tech press came up with them as a convenient shorthand. AMD is only now putting numbers on their GCN revisions, and they're calling them gen 1 through 4, with gen 1 being stuff like the Radeon HD 7970 = R9 280X, gen 2 stuff like R9 290X/390X, and gen 3 being found in eg. the R9 285 and R9 Fury X. Gen 4 is what Polaris 10 & 11 and Vega will be built on.

What is the word with Polaris suddenly not being the flagship? does this mean a furyX re brand, or a wait for Vega?

Neither AMD nor Nvidia are launching huge 14/16nm GPUs at first, because yields would be terrible. They are releasing medium-large GPUs (and below) this year, then the huge ones next year. It's like in winter 2011/12, when the 7970 and GTX 680 arrived with smaller GPUs than the old 6970 and GTX 580 (which they still outperformed). Then later, we got the original GTX Titan, GTX 780, R9 290X etc. once they were ready to launch bigger GPUs.

 

[Robert Cook]

For people confused about "4th gen GCN", the old names like GCN 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 etc. were strictly unofficial, the tech press came up with them as a convenient shorthand. AMD is only now putting numbers on their GCN revisions, and they're calling them gen 1 through 4, with gen 1 being stuff like the Radeon HD 7970 = R9 280X, gen 2 stuff like R9 290X/390X, and gen 3 being found in eg. the R9 285 and R9 Fury X. Gen 4 is what Polaris 10 & 11 and Vega will be built on.

What is the word with Polaris suddenly not being the flagship? does this mean a furyX re brand, or a wait for Vega?

Neither AMD nor Nvidia are launching huge 14/16nm GPUs at first, because yields would be terrible. They are releasing medium-large GPUs (and below) this year, then the huge ones next year. It's like in winter 2011/12, when the 7970 and GTX 680 arrived with smaller GPUs than the old 6970 and GTX 580 (which they still outperformed). Then later, we got the original GTX Titan, GTX 780, R9 290X etc. once they were ready to launch bigger GPUs.

so still Flagship Polaris, just late and Vega comes yet after that?

 

[Sakkura]

so still Flagship Polaris, just late and Vega comes yet after that?

I doubt it's going to be late.

Vega comes out to compete with GP100 next year (assuming GP100 even goes into a Geforce card at all).

 

[TechyInAZ]

so still Flagship Polaris, just late and Vega comes yet after that?

I doubt it's going to be late.

Vega comes out to compete with GP100 next year (assuming GP100 even goes into a Geforce card at all).

Next year? A bit late AMD. However, I haven't seen any ETA's on the Pascal Titan yet either.

 

[renz496]

Vega has been mentioned in AMD road map to be their 2017 gpu. This year will be polaris 10 and polaris 11. Now the talk is if polaris 10 (the highest configuration) will compete with upcoming nvidia GP104 or not. Some say they will some say they might not based on what has been revealed so far. Roy taylor mention nvidia pascal are targeting high end while amd aim to push for mainstream. I think this is where the rumor about polaris will have price of 300 while perform as fast 980ti take some of it's root. some other take this as amd hinting that they will not competing with nvidia pascal on performance.

 

[renz496]

@Sakkura

I think those GCN 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 indeed official names from amd. But starting with polaris they change their code names for a bit. So instead of seeing minor incremental updates on GCN they called it by generations now. I imagine AMD did not want to stay away from GCN core design too much. Even for the upcoming gpu amd hint that most of their power efficiency coming from node shrink and not so much from architecture change.

 

[Sakkura]

Next year? A bit late AMD. However, I haven't seen any ETA's on the Pascal Titan yet either.

No, not late. The Tesla P100 with the GP100 GPU isn't launching until Q1 2017, so that's about the earliest you'd see Nvidia launch a competitor for Vega anyway. It's completely normal that the huge chips aren't launched first, because yields would be terrible. This applies for both AMD and Nvidia.

 

[Sakkura]

@Sakkura

I think those GCN 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 indeed official names from amd. But starting with polaris they change their code names for a bit. So instead of seeing minor incremental updates on GCN they called it by generations now. I imagine AMD did not want to stay away from GCN core design too much. Even for the upcoming gpu amd hint that most of their power efficiency coming from node shrink and not so much from architecture change.

No, those numbers were never used by AMD. They used the code names like Southern Islands and so on, and just referred to the architecture as GCN.

Here is an example:

Bonaire’s Microarchitecture - What We’re Calling GCN 1.1

(that's Anandtech calling it GCN 1.1)

Unfortunately AMD has chosen to more-or-less gloss over the microarchitectural differences altogether, which is not wholly surprising since they will be selling Bonaire and previous generation products side-by-side. Bonaire’s microarchitecture has no official name (at least not one AMD wants to give us) and no version number.

Anyhow, for the sake of our sanity and for our discussions, in lieu of an official name from AMD we’re going to be retroactively renaming AMD’s GCN microarchitectures in order to quickly tell them apart. For the rest of this article and in future articles we will be referring to Southern Islands as GCN 1.0, while Bonaire’s microarchitecture will be GCN 1.1, to reflect the small changes between it and the first rendition of GCN.

And here is Anandtech's up to date look at the architecture naming and Polaris.

 

[renz496]

Even so AMD did not coming up with their own official names for it and readily accept it (i mean they not even try to correct the term to use to describe this changes in GCN) when reviewer refer them as such. But still it does not conflict with how they called it now. Polaris is 4th gen GCN. But some early leaks mistake it as GCN 4.0 which confuse some people (those that did not follow gpu news that closely).

 

[TechyInAZ]

Well, with how powerful pascal is now that we know from yesterday's live stream. I'm really curious now to see what AMD's got up their sleeve.

 

[17seconds]

Time to get excited for Computex (Polaris)? Or are are we waiting for October (Vega)? I'm thinking Polaris is going to be a pleasantly surprising mid-range GPU, but not really competition for Pascal.

By the way Techy, time to sticky this one, and maybe rename it "Polaris/Volta".

 

[Sakkura]

Time to get excited for Computex (Polaris)? Or are are we waiting for October (Volta)? I'm thinking Polaris is going to be a pleasantly surprising mid-range GPU, but not really competition for Pascal.

By the way Techy, time to sticky this one, and maybe rename it "Polaris/Volta".

You mean Vega? Volta is Nvidia's next GPU architecture, still quite a ways off (2018?).

 

[17seconds]

Oh right, the 'V' word (edited).

 

[TechyInAZ]

Time to get excited for Computex (Polaris)? Or are are we waiting for October (Vega)? I'm thinking Polaris is going to be a pleasantly surprising mid-range GPU, but not really competition for Pascal.

By the way Techy, time to sticky this one, and maybe rename it "Polaris/Volta".

Good idea. I'll sticky it until we get a megathread up and running on Polaris/Vega.

 

[mpc007]

My suggested line-up (based on what we know at this moment):

Radeon Pro Duo (Dual Fiji, ultimate enthousiast) ~$1000
Fury / Fury X / Fury Nano (Fiji, top end) ~$500
R9 490/490X (Polaris 10, subtop) ~$300 / claimed perf of 390X at lower price / tdp
R9 480/480X (Antigua > Tonga Rebrand, high end) ~$230
R9 470/470X (Polaris 11, midrange) ~$180 / claimed perf of 370X at lower tdp

R7 460/460X (Tobago > Bonaire Rebrand, low midrange) ~$120
R7 450/450X (Cape Verde Rebrand, entry) ~$100

R5 430/440 (Oland Rebrand, discrete) ~$80

 

[Math Geek]

saw this morning that amd confirmed the 480 would be polaris 10 gpu. i'm expecting a lot from this card and hope it kicks nvidia in the arse with great performance at a great price point.

also saw some released numbers on zen 8 core being literally twice as strong as the 8350 in a benchmark i forget which one though. would compete with the 6 and 8 core extreme cpu's intel has at that performance level if it turns out to be true. more than i expected from zen if it can compete with the top end intel cpu's!!

 

[mpc007]

Link to your source? I know that some people claim Polaris 10 at 480 but it's just not the logical step. Because they wouldn't have ANY card for the x9 placeholder (which always had a card in it for like decades now)

 

[Math Geek]

sorry here it is http://videocardz.com/60232/amd-radeon-r9-480-based-on-polaris-10

plus what appears to be come benchmarks for it putting it at better than gtx 970 performance range http://videocardz.com/60253/amd-radeon-r9-480-3dmark11-benchmarks

 

[Sakkura]

sorry here it is http://videocardz.com/60232/amd-radeon-r9-480-based-on-polaris-10

plus what appears to be come benchmarks for it putting it at better than gtx 970 performance range http://videocardz.com/60253/amd-radeon-r9-480-3dmark11-benchmarks

That's not confirmed by AMD. That's "confirmed through our independent sources" which may or may not be reliable.

 

[mpc007]

Interesting. But I'm also a bit sceptical. If Polaris 10 is going to be 480, then it's not a competitor for Pascal, period. So all tech sites hinting on that by posting certain (imcomplete) benches would be wrong. Not so sure if that is viable.

 

[17seconds]

That's pretty much accepted at this point that Pascal won't have any competition until Vega in October. I think it 's even been officially acknowledged by AMD.

 

[mpc007]

Is it now? I still had hope that Polaris 10 will offer 90 percent of GTX 1070 performance at 75 percent the price. Something like that.

 

[Sakkura]

Is it now? I still had hope that Polaris 10 will offer 90 percent of GTX 1070 performance at 75 percent the price. Something like that.

It very well could do that. Doesn't mean they can't call it a 480.

People seem to be overinterpreting AMD's description of Polaris 10 as "mainstream" - the GP104 in the GTX 1080 and 1070 is also a mainstream part, though perhaps more towards the upper end of the mainstream than Polaris 10. It's just that today's mainstream is yesterday's high-end.