AMD Arctic Islands Will Double Performance Per Watt

With both AMD and Nvidia set to debut new GPU architectures next year,  many are expecting both greater performance and improved performance per watt. While Nvidia has recently taken the lead in this area, it looks like AMD is making big gains themselves. According to CEO Lisa Su, Artic Islands will double performance per watt over the current offerings. This will place Artic Islands well past Maxwell though Pascal is still an unknown at this point.

In order to get such a large improvement, AMD is counting on their architectural improvements, continued use of HBM, as well as the process advantage moving from 28nm to TSMC’s 16nm FF+. At this point, it’s hard to determine what current offerings means, with calculations based off Tonga coming in ahead of Maxwell by a good margin but using Fiji as a baseline will give even better gains.

With improved performance per watt, we can also expect raw performance to improve as well. With lower TDP, we can expect larger dies which obviously give more performance if done right. A new architecture also opens up room for good gains as does the increased die sizes available from the new process. 2016 will be pretty interesting as AMD and Nvidia battle it out, with AMD given a chance to take back some much need marketshare.