[Rumor - WCCFTech] AMD Arctic Islands 400 Series Set To Launch In Summer of 2016

[IntelUser2000]

Some speculation on Polaris/Vega. This might not be popular opinion.

What we know-

Radeon Pro Duo: $1499 @ Q2 2016
Vega: previously known to be top of the line AI series in early 2017?
Polaris 10: Faster out of the two chips(10 and 11) with performance in range of current Fury X

My conclusion: Polaris 10 will be the top of the line branded AMD GPU this year with performance that's maybe 5-10% better than Fury X. The only big change is greatly decreased power usage. It'll be possibly marketed towards HTPC/NUC-like form factor users.

Vega is the original top of the line AI chip with 2x the performance of Fury X.

 

[jpiniero]

Polaris 10: Faster out of the two chips(10 and 11) with performance in range of current Fury X

I don't know if we really know that, but that wouldn't be too bad. It does seem like it won't be competitive with the X80, but as long as it's faster than the X70 I guess people won't mind too much. People will complain about the price (I'll say ~$429 or what the 390X is going for now) but that's going to happen with this node.

 

[Qwertilot]

It'd be entirely fine, although imagine some will make a big thing of it.

Wait 9-12 months and you will of course be able to get these cards rather cheaper These things are going to end up as the entry/mid level cards after all.

 

[Jhatfie]

My gut anticipates Polaris 10 will slightly outperform Fury X. I expect it to be $449 though, so it will not be a bargain, but it will be priced fairly compared to equivalent performing Nvidia card. Once Vega drops, Polaris 10 may drop $50 bringing it to $399, but Full Vega will be at least $650 and cut down Vega card will be $550.

 

[Game_dev]

My gut anticipates Polaris 10 will slightly outperform Fury X. I expect it to be $449 though, so it will not be a bargain, but it will be priced fairly compared to equivalent performing Nvidia card. Once Vega drops, Polaris 10 may drop $50 bringing it to $399, but Full Vega will be at least $650 and cut down Vega card will be $550.

I saw an open box 980ti for $520 today. If NVIDIA launches in May the 980ti could drop below $500 which would leave very little room for Polaris in that space.


Talking about Nvidia in the AMD section
Not allowed.
Markfw900

 

[alcoholbob]

My gut anticipates Polaris 10 will slightly outperform Fury X. I expect it to be $449 though, so it will not be a bargain, but it will be priced fairly compared to equivalent performing Nvidia card. Once Vega drops, Polaris 10 may drop $50 bringing it to $399, but Full Vega will be at least $650 and cut down Vega card will be $550.

If Polaris 10 is really 232mm² and perform at the 10% faster than the the Fury X @ 598mm² that would be impressive, Artic Islands would be a 45% improvement over the Fury series in architectural efficiency, transistor to transistor.

That's a bigger jump than Maxwell over Keplar (which was 30-35% transistor efficiency improvement).

Since we know Pascal is basically just Maxwell on 20nm, AMD cards could be 30% faster than what Nvidia has this generation.

 

[gamervivek]

There are two vega chips like polaris, AT confirmed it.

Meanwhile AMD has also confirmed the number of GPUs in the Vega stack and their names. We’ll be seeing a Vega 10 and a Vega 11. This follows Polaris GPU naming – which has finally been confirmed – with Polaris 10 and Polaris 11. I have also been told that Polaris 11 is the smaller of the Polaris GPUs, so at this point it’s reasonable to assume the same for Vega.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10145/amd-unveils-gpu-architecture-roadmap-after-polaris-comes-vega

It's pretty likely that Baffin XT is Polaris 10 and the Vega 11 samples have been shipped recently, 30% pricier while Vega 10 is more than twice as expensive.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Hmm, B3D guys are saying Polaris 10 has 36CUs, meaning 2304SPs. The performance in Hitman is remarkable if that's the case.

Do we need to see this as similar to how Fury X's claims were? They were saying it was so-and-so faster than 980Ti.

It does seem like it won't be competitive with the X80, but as long as it's faster than the X70 I guess people won't mind too much.

The same guys are saying the "leaked" specs are fake. Their argument seems to be logical. That the yields aren't yet high enough for making 500mm2 die chip again.

2016 GPUs-Power Efficient low power GPUs
2017 GPUs-Performance focused

?

 

[gamervivek]

Looks like I was wrong about Baffin, AMD's open source linux driver for polaris updates the code names to polaris 10/11 from ELM/BAF,

drm/amdgpu: change ELM/BAF to Polaris10/Polaris11
Adjust to preferred code names. Signed-off-by: Flora Cui <Flora.Cui@amd.com> Reviewed-by: Alex Deucher <alexander.deucher@amd.com>

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~agd5f...s&id=f3737d519277961f295f0a17e337f63542d17efb

Some other findings here,

https://semiaccurate.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8635&page=52

 

[crisium]

Hmm, B3D guys are saying Polaris 10 has 36CUs, meaning 2304SPs. The performance in Hitman is remarkable if that's the case.

Link to this discussion?

Whether due to higher clockrates, more IPC, or both, that would amazing if a 2304SP Polaris 10 is faster than Fury X.

 

[raghu78]

Link to this discussion?

Whether due to higher clockrates, more IPC, or both, that would amazing if a 2304SP Polaris 10 is faster than Fury X.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...ors-and-discussion.56719/page-48#post-1901850

http://ranker.sisoftware.net/show_r...e0d2e3d4e7d0e8cebc81b197f297aa9abccff2ca&l=en

So Polaris 10 looks to be 2304sp, 256 bit GDDR5 @ 6 Ghz, 8GB. We still don't know if its a fully enabled SKU. btw it now looks like Baffin is Polaris 11 and Ellesmere is Polaris 10. We already saw Baffin XT as 4 GB GDDR5. So it makes sense that AMD has gone for higher memory configs after the Fury X problem with VRAM capacity.

 

[Mahigan]

Baffin is the bigger of the two Polaris GPUs. If the bigger GPU is Polaris 10 then Baffin is Polaris 10.

Baffin is an Island more than twice the size of Ellesmere Island. Greenland is evidently larger than both.

I think that we will see many SKUs and a BaffinXT would be the performance part. I'm still banking on BaffinXT using 4GB of HBM. I think that smaller Baffin SKUs may use 8GB of GDDR5.

Ellesmere will no doubt use GDDR5.

 

[Vaporizer]

This makes no sense to me? BaffinXT with different memory controller to enable usage of HBM would be a complete new chip design compared to Baffin. How does this fit with only 2 Polaris Chips?

 

[MrTeal]

This makes no sense to me? BaffinXT with different memory controller to enable usage of HBM would be a complete new chip design compared to Baffin. How does this fit with only 2 Polaris Chips?

That's only if BaffinXT has HBM, and there's no reason to think that's the case.

 

[kawi6rr]

Edit

 

[Headfoot]

This makes no sense to me? BaffinXT with different memory controller to enable usage of HBM would be a complete new chip design compared to Baffin. How does this fit with only 2 Polaris Chips?

Vega are the big chips based on the next GCN. Polaris are the small and middle chips. Vega will get HBM, Polaris will not. It'll be like GM204 vs GM200. Different dies but same architecture, or very similar at least.

 

[holden j caufield]

So are these going to be good VR video cards? I'm going to start building my VR machine or is the other brand a better VR card (I'm looking for price/performance). This card is due out this summer?

 

[digitaldurandal]

So are these going to be good VR video cards? I'm going to start building my VR machine or is the other brand a better VR card (I'm looking for price/performance). This card is due out this summer?

If you had to choose right now it appears that AMD offerings have an edge for VR. However, I would wait and see.

 

[Glo.]

Hawaii with 275W TDP and 5120 TFLOPs of compute power has around 18.6 GFLOPs/Watt of power.
If we go with 2.5 improvement over the 28nm GPUs, that AMD claims, and we will use the Sisoft benchmark as a factor we end up with 1150 MHz 2560 GCN core GPU at 125W, that comes close to that 2.5 times factor. It would be faster even than Grenada XT...

 

[Qwertilot]

Good cards for VR not really to be expected until they know what that means in terms of real games/can design for it. So def not yet