AMD introduces Polaris architecture for GPUs

AMD has announced a new architecture for video cards and embedded GPUs. The architecture has been given the name Polaris and should be produced with 16nm finfet technology in the course of 2016.

AMD releases few details in its communication about Polaris, but does promise significant improvements in the new GPU architecture. Some come from the intrinsic improvements associated with the new 16nm finfet manufacturing technology and some come from the Polaris design. AMD’s current GPUs are still produced at 28nm by TSMC. The move to 16nm finfet technology enables more economical transistors that suffer less from leakage currents in an idle state, but offer better performance. That should reduce the energy consumption of Polaris GPUs.

In addition, AMD has made architectural changes to the Polaris GPUs, which would significantly improve performance. That should result in powerful, economical GPUs. AMD showed a Polaris GPU that makes Star Wars: Battlefront playable at 1080p at 60fps with a power consumption of 86W. The competition would do the same with 140W on a GTX 950.

The Polaris GPU would have an architecture that has been significantly changed compared to previous GPUs. The graphics core next architecture has been updated and brought to the fourth generation. Almost all parts of the GPU have been renewed, from the cache and memory controller to the multimedia cores and display engine and geometry processor. For example, support for displayport 1.3 and hdmi 2.0a has been added and the GPUs can encode and decode 4k video with the h265 codec. AMD plans to introduce the first Polaris GPUs by mid-year.

It is still unclear who will produce the GPUs for AMD. The company speaks in its presentation of a 16nm finfet process, but mentions 14nm in its press release. The Taiwanese company TSMC, AMD’s traditional partner for GPUs, could take care of the production of Polaris GPUs at 16nm. Earlier there was talk of GPU production by Samsung or GlobalFoundries, which licensed Samsung’s 14nm finfet process. AMD has not yet announced which products will appear with Polaris architecture, which specifications they will receive and when we can expect them.