[Sweclockers] AMD preparing new architecture for 2016: Arctic Islands

[Mondozei]

After Volcanic Islands(The 200-series in 2013/2014) and Pirate Islands (this year, the 300-series), we will see the Arctic Islands. It will be debuted in 2016. This seems to suggest that AMD understands that it was a mistake to leave the Volcanic Islands for two years running, as it slowed down the pace of innovation, a mistake that they are now looking to fix.

It'll be interesting to see if it is released at the same time as the Zen CPU architecture and if there will be any benefits to using both.

Oh, and Source

 

[Elixer]

There also must be a new chipset to go along with Zen & AI that finally brings in PCIe 3.x natively for AMD's gear.

Bets are it won't be until 2016 Q3, or even Q4 before anyone sees anything.
That is a heck of a long time.

 

[ThatBuzzkiller]

I wonder which team is designing AI ...

Cause PI is looking to be GCN 1.3 or 1.5 ...

It'll be amazing if it's from the guys who designed Tahiti and Hawaii ..

 

[Erenhardt]

That must be "the Iceland" sushi was talking about.

 

[RussianSensation]

I don't know what to think. If this is true, but AI is not on 14/16nm, it will probably have no shot to compete against 2016 Pascal. Coincidentally, if it is 14/16nm, R9 300 will be extremely short lived (1.5 years or so). I guess I don't mind if GPUs started advancing a lot quicker! I think both AMD and NV now see that it's just too costly and risky to do 50-100% flagship boost at once as was the status quo prior to GK204/680. I think after R9 380X (390X?) AMD will try to do smaller bursts of 20-30% but at quicker intervals instead of trying to hit 50-100% every 2-2.5 years leaving their flagship to be walked over by NV's newly adopted "Kepler release strategy" of bifurcating the mid-range die and flagship die.

I guess it's going to become a vague concept of what exactly is a "flagship" GPU if this almost Tick-Tock-like GPU model prevails. However, 1 positive is that the last gen's top card would depreciate way faster once a new gen launches, which means buying 1.5-year-old Tick "flagship" card on clearance could become a big way to save $ and have say 20-30% less performance than the Tock model.

 

[Black Octagon]

Interesting thoughts, RS. But what you describe sounds more like a rapid "tick-tick-tick-tick" without the tock ...

 

[geoxile]

Interesting thoughts, RS. But what you describe sounds more like a rapid "tick-tick-tick-tick" without the tock ...

Not too uncommon for AMD to change the microarch while moving to a new process. So maybe it'd be more like tick-ticktock-tick

 

[DooKey]

If tick-tock is the new thing I'm all for it. I want new tech often to scratch my itch..