Quick look at Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 with expected release later this month

It was just a few days ago that NVIDIA announced its new GPUs GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 which showed much higher performance in comparison to top models from the previous Maxwell architecture. And now it is time for AMD to fight back, and the date when this will happen is between 26th and 29th of May – it hasn’t been fixed yet. This means that we will see the Polaris architecture right before one of the most important technological events in the year – Computex.

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If the announcement of Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 happens after May 27th, the GeForce GTX 1080 will have been already released on the market and AMD will hardly have any time to delay the sales of its new GPUs in the way NVIDIA is doing now. As we said above, the announcement date is yet to be fixed. Despite this, we know where the conference will take place – Macau, China.

It is namely there that the new and revolutionary architecture by AMD will be presented. The new GPUs “containing” the Polaris particle are labeled Polaris 10 and Polaris 11. Earlier this year we saw the two series and it was their size that impressed us. Of course, we should not be surprised, considering the latest discrete chips by AMD that are based on the Fiji core – Radeon R9 Nano, Fury and Fury X. Their sizes are small and yet contain high performance. It will take us less than three weeks to learn the exact performance of AMD’s new GPUs.

amd-roadmap

For now we know, however, that Polaris 10 will be the more powerful chip and this was confirmed at Capsaicin 2016 where the GPU was running Hitman on a monitor with 1440p resolution and 60 fps. Even though we expected this to be the new Nano or Fury GPU, AMD confirmed that Polaris 10 will target mainstream users, or, in other words, it will be a successor to R9 390/R9 390X. According to AMD these two GPUs aim at “enthusiasts”, which makes us further speculate that Polaris 10 will target high-end users (not the highest though).

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Furthermore, AMD confirmed that you will be able to install the new chip to high-end mobile devices thanks to its new architecture, which reduces power consumption almost twice. Despite this, the performance is high enough for you to enjoy the latest games – evertything a user needs in his daily use of the laptop.

On the other hand, Polaris 11 was displayed at CES 2016 where it was compared to the GeForce GTX 950 in terms of power consumption – a difference of almost 50 Watts which is crucial with mobile devices. Even though that during the event the GPU was used in a desktop configuration, we expect Polaris 11 to be found in mid-range laptops, because the expected consumption is below 50 Watts, while the chip is powerful enough for 15-inchers with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels.

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It is toward the end of May that we shall find the answers to many other questions and until then you can browse through AMD’s current GPUs: http://amzn.to/1qaIwBJ

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