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Meets AMD Polaris the 4th generation of AMD GCN GPU architecture
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Meets AMD Polaris the 4th generation of AMD GCN GPU architecture

by Muhammad FirdausJanuary 6, 2016
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It’s a hot topic on the internet right now, as AMD has teased details of their next-gen GPU architecture, called Polaris. It is the 4th generation of AMD GCN GPU. But what’s the big deal with the new AMD Polaris architecture? Let’s take a walk through the AMD slides about the Polaris architecture and get to know it a little better.

Beginning of the Journey

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The first ATI Radeon card the ATI Radeon 7000 or known as RV100 is the first card from ATI with 180nm process node and a year later the ATI Radeon 9700 GPU or R300 was introduced with full DirectX 9.0 compliance and today we will have the latest Polaris architecture based on 16nm FinFET technologies, coming soon in mid 2016.

Polaris Architecture

Polaris name is given by Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) as part of their new naming convention. With the new architecture the Polaris essentially is a collection of different cores / engines.

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Polaris architecture is a new GPU Macro-architecture which features the 4th generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) and also an optimized implementation of FinFET. Among the key features are support for HDMI 2.0a, DisplayPort 1.3 and 4K h.265 encoding and decoding.

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Polaris and FinFET

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The new Polaris architectures is designed on a smaller node process to help lower power consumption and also bring better performance per watt. But to make thing smaller is not easy as the challenge is difficult like static leakage which can hurt the overall performance.

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Chips based on FinFET technology provides fundamental performance and power benefit over planar designs which helps when driving power consumption down and allows higher performance per watt. This architecture has high potential for implementation into new products, such as thin & light gaming notebooks, small form factor desktops and power connector-free discrete graphic cards.

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Performance per watt for Radeon GPUs

With the FinFET process node the Polaris will have a significant Perf/W improvement over the previous GCN architecture. In the slide below a test shows that the new Polaris architecture have almost doubled power efficiency over the competition. With lower power consumption figures there’s a chance for AMD’s comeback in mobile graphics. The “competition” in the slide below is a GTX 950, a rather efficient GPU based on NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture, but yet appears to be outclassed by the Polaris engineering sample tested.

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Pokdepinion: With the FinFET technologies at their disposal, AMD could produce powerful desktop graphic cards with less power connectors, while if implemented for mobile GPUs, it could introduce a whole new performance level for gaming notebooks. If we consider about its implementation in APUs, the AMD Zen could be an awesome product if it walks the right path. Think about pairing AMD Zen CPU cores with Polaris GPU cores…

About The Author
Muhammad Firdaus
I love technology, so I love AMD.
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