AMD’s CEO confirmed late last week in a round table discussion during CES 2016 that Polaris Radeon graphics cards will be released before the back to school season, for both Desktop and laptops. The annual back to school season spans the period between mid July and early September
every year. As such the company’s commitment to have graphics products
based on its latest Polaris architecture before then is notably more
specific than the previous goal of around “mid 2016”.
The annual back to school season has particular importance for OEMs,
because its when the likes of HP, Dell and Lenovo would normally
introduce new devices in North America. As such having new graphics
technology at hand before then to deploy into the latest designs is
essential. During a press event back in December at which AMD divulged
its Polaris to us and the rest of the media for the very first time, the
company inferred in no certain terms that its aiming to introduce its
small, mobile focused Polaris GPU first with an enthusiast variant to
follow.
We’re referring to the chip that AMD demoed against the GTX 950 running Star Wars Battlefront at 60FPS and nearly half the power. Speaking with computerbase.de CEO
Lisa Su cited the significant perf/watt jump with Polaris as a critical
factor for notebooks, but that there will also be a mainstream desktop
graphics solution based on this very same chip.
Apart from this mobile-centric small Polaris GPU we were also made aware
of an enthusiast version that I’d mentioned above which is also coming
out. This “enthusiast” Polaris GPU has since been shown to journalists yesterday at CES. It
has been described as the “successor” to the R9 Fury X and R9 390X
graphics cards, so it’s clearly a high-end part. This is all part of
AMD”s plan to release several SKUs based on each GPU to cover the entire
market and regain market share Su affirmed. From entry level graphics
products to mid-range and high-end parts. Which is how AMD and
Nvidia have always chose to address the different market segments, so no
real surprises here.
AMD has said that the Polaris graphics architecture will bring about
a “historic” leap in performance per watt. Interestingly this is the
inspiration behind the “Polaris” code name. Stars are the most efficient
photon production engines in the universe, this is why AMD found it
only fitting to call the most ambitious graphics architecture it has
ever engineered “Polaris” after the brightest star that can be seen
from earth.
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.
