AMD Announces New 14nmm FinFET GPU Architecture Called Polaris

[Brian 1980]

AMD has just e-mailed the press release (found at the end of this article) for it's new next generation 14nm FinFET GPU architecture called Polaris. In addition, AMD has produced a new video in which Raja Koduri, SVP and Chief Architect of AMD's Radeon Technology Group, and others from AMD, discuss Polaris and also give us a demonstration of it with 2x perf/watt gains vs "a comparable GPU from the competition".  

 

 

Earlier VideoCardz leaked some Polaris slides that are now confirmed as being accurate so we've included them here:

 

A lot of this information isn't a big surprise to those that follow the GPU industry closely but at least now we have official confirmation from AMD. The following is their official press release:

 

Quote

AMD Demonstrates Revolutionary 14nm FinFET Polaris GPU Architecture

 

— The world’s first public showcase of 14nm FinFET PC GPU technology promises more than double the performance per watt over previous generations; now sampling to OEMs —

 

LONDON, UK. — CES 2016 – 4th Jan, 2016 — AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) provided customers with a glimpse of its upcoming 2016 Polaris GPU architecture, highlighting a wide range of significant architectural improvements including HDR monitor support, and industry-leading performance-per-watt. AMD expects shipments of Polaris architecture-based GPUs to begin in mid-2016.

 

AMD’s Polaris architecture-based 14nm FinFET GPUs deliver a remarkable generational jump in power efficiency. Polaris-based GPUs are designed for fluid frame rates in graphics, gaming, VR and multimedia applications running on compelling small form-factor thin and light computer designs.

“Our new Polaris architecture showcases significant advances in performance, power efficiency and features,” said Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. “2016 will be a very exciting year for Radeon™ fans driven by our Polaris architecture, Radeon Software Crimson Edition and a host of other innovations in the pipeline from our Radeon Technologies Group.”

 

The Polaris architecture features AMD’s 4th generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, a next-generation display engine with support for HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3, and next-generation multimedia features including 4K h.265 encoding and decoding.

 

AMD has an established track record for dramatically increasing the energy efficiency of its mobile processors, targeting a 25x improvement by the year 2020.

 

EDIT: Article corrected for errors 1/4/16

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