So all the talk about bringing VR down in cost and giving gamers a lot of perf/$ isn't just hype. Ofc as soon as Raja said that, it should have been plain obvious that Polaris is meant to be cheap and hence, only GDDR5.
I think I understand what's going on when they demo Hitman 1440p, outside looking into the boat scene with a ton of NPCs hidden.
That people, is the Primitive Discard Accelerator in action. On 390X, that scene will drop below 60 fps easy (I know, I have the game). But Polaris doesn't even take in those geometry into it's pipeline to process and then Z-cull, it discards it before rendering even occurs. This results is huge improvements to minimum FPS when the scene complexity is bottlenecking the engine.
It may well only be 390X class performance normally, but it will perform better at MIN FPS in GPU bound scenarios. That's what they played, those tricksters at AMD...
Just like their perf/w comparison at 60 fps vsync lock. They would have massively improved power gating and so if the GPU isn't running max load, power usage drop a lot.
However the curious thing is why there's so few SP, 232mm2 Polaris 10 with 14ff density can easily fit much more than that unless they have really changed the design so that each SP takes many more transistors.