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AMD's next-generation Polaris GPU architecture could enable smaller, more powerful notebooks

By Koh Wanzi - on 6 Jan 2016, 12:16pm

AMD's next-generation Polaris GPU architecture could enable smaller, more powerful notebooks

AMD Polaris

It feels like just yesterday that AMD released the HBM-equipped Radeon R9 Fury X and its new Fiji GPU architecture. Nevertheless, AMD still needs to look ahead to its next-generation GPU architecture if it is going to challenge NVIDIA in terms of performance-per-watt, and especially after it released its entire 300-series of cards based on rebranded GPUs. And considering that NVIDIA’s Pascal GPU architecture may just launch in the second quarter of this year, AMD’s announcement could not have been better timed.

Dubbed Polaris, after the North Star, the new architecture will finally abandon the 28nm process node in favor of the 14nm/16nm FinFET transistors, and will thus offer significant gains in power efficiency. According to AMD, we can expect “industry-leading” performance-per-watt figures, in addition to support for HDR monitors, HDMI 2.0a, and DisplayPort 1.3 – part of the company’s push to advance image quality on displays in 2016.

Polaris will actually be AMD’s fourth-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, which first debuted in 2012. But while it’s not a radical new architecture that has been redesigned from the ground up, it does feature several design adjustments aimed at improving AMD’s performance-per-watt vis-à-vis NVIDIA.

AMD hasn’t quite gone into the details yet, but it has identified its new primitive discard accelerator, tuned hardware scheduler, better instruction pre-fetch capabilities, improved shader efficiency and memory compression as areas that have been upgraded. This will reportedly facilitate the largest performance-per-watt leap in the company’s history, including when it was still known as ATI.

These improvements aside, it’s likely that the transitioning to the smaller 14nm/16nm FinFET process played a large role in the efficiency gains as well. FinFET is actually considered a 3D transistor, featuring multiple fins that make it possible to control leakage current in a way that the older planar transistors could not.

AMD Polaris FinFET

That was part of the reason why manufacturers were stuck on the 28nm process for so long – leakage issues made planar transistors below 28nm impractical, and it is only now that the 14nm FinFET process has matured enough for AMD to take advantage of it. The result is a faster, lower-leakage transistor of a uniform structure, which also means less variation and consequently more consistent binning.

AMD Polaris FinFET

To put all this in perspective, consider that AMD also demonstrated a Polaris-based GPU running Star Wars Battlefront and compared that with another system running an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950. After standardizing performance at 60fps (both systems used the same Intel Core i7-4790K CPU), the one with the Polaris GPU averaged 86 watts, whereas the other consumed around 140 watts. What’s more, AMD said that there are still SoC-level power features it hasn’t enabled yet, so power efficiency could be even better.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the Polaris announcement is what it could mean for mobile gaming. AMD wants to equip compact notebooks with GPUs capable of pushing 60fps at 1080p, a previously unthinkable achievement for anything short of a bulky gaming notebook. But with Polaris, that may just be within reach. Availability is planned for the middle of 2016, so we won't have that long to wait.

AMD Polaris mobile gaming

One final thing to note is that AMD will be utilizing both GlobalFoundries’ 14nm process and TSMC’s 16nm process, making this the first time it will be using more than one fab. However, AnandTech reports that there is no expectation that AMD will be dual-sourcing Polaris, and the designs may instead be split between the two fabs, perhaps according to the different performance tiers.

Source: AMD

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