If AMD wants to stay in a relevant position during 2016, it needs to present products that turn the company into a truly relentless competitor. The first signs showed up through the Zen architecture for its future processors, but now it's Polaris's turn—the new 14-nanometer architecture that the Radeon Technologies Group has prepared for the new fleet of graphics cards that will hit the market in a few months.
AMD tried to keep its Polaris information under wraps, but some leaks confirmed its existence several days before the official embargo was lifted. Naturally, every company tries to play its cards at the best moment; however, there is so much that Polaris brings to the table that the specialized press can't hide its enthusiasm. For years, the graphics card market has been trapped in 28nm territory. Both AMD and Nvidia improved many aspects of their cards, but the manufacturing process remained relatively untouched. With the demands of new technologies like 4K video and virtual reality, the feeling is that manufacturers must find a way to move forward and optimize their processes.
What Polaris Brings to the Table
That is, first and foremost, what Polaris brings. This new architecture, which also symbolizes the fourth generation of Graphics Core Next, is based on a 14-nanometer FinFET process, which by itself means notable improvements in energy efficiency. During the official presentation, representatives of the Radeon Technologies Group put a Polaris sample in a head-to-head fight with an Nvidia GTX 950 under Star Wars: Battlefront. Using the same configuration (Medium, 60 FPS, V-Sync lock, 1080p), the Nvidia hardware averages a consumption of 150 watts (for the entire system), while Polaris landed between 85 and 90 watts.
More Than Just Power Efficiency
And that's not all: Polaris includes full H.265 4K support (encoding and decoding), DisplayPort 1.3, and HDMI 2.0a, which eliminates the 30 FPS/60 Hz limit on 4K signals imposed by HDMI 1.4a. While our instinct tells us to take the energy data with a grain of salt (after all, it was a controlled demo with a 60 FPS cap), Polaris's potential is there. The architecture will have products with GDDR5 and HBM memory, though HBM is likely to be restricted to high-end models. When? "Mid-2016," the representatives said. We'll be waiting.
