An early sample of AMD Radeon Polaris 11 is in our office and here’s what to expect [EDIT]

EDOT: It seems that the initial claims of our source were wrong and the unit we received as a sample featured the AMD Radeon M430, which isn’t a Polaris GPU. We were able to identify thanks to our friend Maciej from Videocardz.com. We take full responsibility for the mistake but we were really hyped about the news about testing the Polaris sample. In hindsight, we should have first taken a better look at the sample and make sure it’s the real deal before posting. We assure you we didn’t gain anything from all the confusion, except bad rep.

Anyway, we are still waiting for a Polaris sample in the near future, which we will receive from our source, so in the meantime, you can check out the AMD A9-9410 CPU and AMD Radeon R5 M430 (2GB DDR3) units we were able to test on the aforementioned sample. You can also look up the chips in our CPU and GPU rankings.

EDIT: It has come to our attention that the Polaris 11 is actually the codename for the GPU integrated into consoles and mobile devices (laptops). According to earlier reports, it was the other way around, but thanks to our readers and some research on the web, it has been pointed out that the Polaris 10 is actually the desktop-class GPU despite the smaller number in the name.

We’ve all heard about AMD’s response to the NVIDIA’s Pascal generation CPUs but not all had the chance to test the new GPUs. Luckily, we were able to get our hands on an early engineering sample of what is believed to be an AMD Radeon Polaris 11 series GPU. 11 means that the GPU is used in consoles and notebooks and in our case – a notebook.

The laptop we have is considered to be low to mid-range notebook so the chances are that we are not testing the high-end model. However, it will give us a good grasp of what’s to come from AMD’s Polaris generation and how will compete in the mid-range segment against NVIDIA’s Pascal counterparts.

One of the most notable features we are really excited about is the brand new GCN 4 architecture that brings tons of new features including the well-known instruction pre-fetch, which is found in the CPU industry. Along with the GCN 4, the company finally goes 14nm on its graphic chips using the FinFET manufacturing technology process. This will decrease the overall power consumption at idle and at load while limiting the leakage of current and lower heat dispersion.

We are eager to test out the full potential of the GPU so expect full set of test and a full review in the coming days or week.

EDIT: It has come to our attention that the Polaris 11 is actually the codename for the GPU integrated into consoles and mobile devices (laptops). According to earlier reports, it was the other way around, but thanks to our readers and some research on the web, it has been pointed out that the Polaris 10 is actually the desktop-class GPU despite the smaller number in the name.