AMD Polaris 10 and 11 Will Deliver Revolutionary Performance Increase

For 2016, AMD has confirmed they will be releasing at least 2 Polaris based GPUs. According to AMD’s CES presentation, these have been preliminarily dubbed Polaris 10 and 11. Based off the new Polaris architecture, the 10 is similarly sized to Cape Verde while the 11 is of similar size to Fiji and likely AMD’s 2016 flagship. With the CES demo chip likely being Polaris 10, we’re now getting word from RTG head Raja Koduri about what AMD is expecting with Polaris.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Koduri had this to say:

We have two versions of these FinFET GPUs. Both are extremely power efficient. This is Polaris 10 and that’s Polaris 11. In terms of what we’ve done at the high level, it’s our most revolutionary jump in performance so far. We’ve redesigned many blocks in our cores. We’ve redesigned the main processor, a new geometry processor, a completely new fourth-generation Graphics Core Next with a very high increase in performance. We have new multimedia cores, a new display engine.

This is very early silicon, by the way. We have much more performance optimization to do in the coming months. But even in this early silicon, we’re seeing numbers versus the best class on the competition running at a heavy workload, like Star Wars—The competing system consumes 140 watts. This is 86 watts. We believe we’re several months ahead of this transition, especially for the notebook and the mainstream market. […]

In summary, it’s fourth generation Graphics Core Next. HDMI 2.0. It supports all the new 4K displays and TVs coming out with just plug and play. It supports display core 4.3, the latest specification. It’s very exciting 4K support. We can do HAVC encode and decode at 4K on this chip. It’ll be great for game streaming at high resolution, which gamers absolutely love. It takes no cycles away from games. You can record gameplay and still have an awesome frame rate. It’ll be available in mid-2016.

As we noted in our initial Polaris coverage, AMD has heavily reworked GCN to suit the new reality. When Polaris does launch, it will likely usher in a new era for GPUs. This years is looking to be really exciting and here’s hoping it lives up to the hype.