AMD’s power-sipping Polaris GPU puts a rocket under your laptop’s bonnet

As we’ve come accustomed to, with each announcement we get a glimpse into the company’s latest and greatest tech and this time it’s all about graphics.

AMD’s Polaris architecture-based 14nm FinFET GPUs deliver a remarkable generational jump in power efficiency.

Polaris will be a significant shift from the 28nm process now used by AMD.

Raja Koduri, vice president at AMD and chief architect of the Radeon Technologies Group holds a very ambitious goal of powering 90% of the world’s pixels. To that end – and I am sure many of you are eager to hear about – as part of their presentation RTG showed off the first Polaris GPU in action, however briefly. Perhaps more importantly, it’ll be just as fast as a comparable Nvidia part, while using a lot less power, the company said. (NASDAQ:AMD) [Detail Analytic Report] delivered customers with a glance of its upcoming 2016 Polaris GPU architecture, highlighting a broad range of important architectural improvements including HDR monitor support, and industry-leading performance-per-watt. For AMD’s 2016 graphics products the company updated all aspects of its graphics IP. It also includes support for HDMI 2a, as well as DisplayPort 1.3 compatibility. 265 4K decode and encode acceleration.

The RTG believes that bridging this enormous gap is going to require new, more efficient rendering approaches born from techniques like light-field rendering, texture-space rendering, and foveated rendering in tandem with more powerful hardware. Instruction pre-fetch is a technology that’s always been employed in CPUs and it works to improve performance by reducing stalls and unnecessary wait times.

About AMD For more than 45 years, AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics, and visualization technologies – the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms, and the datacenter. Which really goes to show just how complex these beasts have become. Geometry processing and the memory controller stand out as potentially interesting to me – AMD’s Fiji design continues to lag behind NVIDIA’s Maxwell in terms of tessellation performance and we would love to see that shift.

A few weeks back, we attended a summit hosted by AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group. For example, Polaris is based on GlobalFoundries’ 14nm FinFET technology.

Once the new chips hit testing and teardown labs later this year, they likely will give new insights into the relative performance and robustness of competing FinFET processes and DRAM stacks. It’s exciting news for notebooks, too – the die shrink means smaller form factors are possible than in previous graphics card generations, and coupled with better performance per watt that makes for an encouraging recipe for mobile GPUs. This should allow AMD (and NVIDIA) to better predict bins for this generation of GPUs. AMD is making all the fins the same height and that uniformity helps AMD keep power efficiency up.

Normally, we’d describe those transistors using a feature size like 28 nm or 14 nm, but AMD didn’t share details of the exact processes it’s targeting for the production of Polaris chips at its summit.

Getting finny AMD says Polaris chips have been designed specifically for fabrication with FinFETs.

For their brief demonstration, RTG set up a pair of otherwise identical Core i7 systems running Star Wars Battlefront. The GTX 950 tested with 359.06 drivers. The Polaris GPU tested was an early engineering sample and both hardware and driver optimizations are still on-going.