Polaris vs Pascal May Happen Anytime Soon

AMD’s Roy Taylor dropped the bomb about the market segment that the Polaris GPU family wishes to tackle, and turns out that it’s going to be a mainstream product – At least for now, according to the company. Reason is, AMD wants to tackle the total available market. Meaning that they want to maximize the revenue opportunity by providing a good performing architecture for the majority of the market base. After all, the mainstream segment still holds the key for the greatest profitable margins.

Polaris Pascal News (1)

Expanding the total available market is also a mission for AMD, as they want more consumers to take PC Gaming and VR into consideration. Tackling the mainstream gamers with a competitively priced GPU that could play VR content is the best possible thing to do for AMD. After all, AMD is ahead of Nvidia when it comes to VR related market developments with LiquidVR backing them up for the developers, and the combination of PCs plus consoles forming a huge VR capable market share advantage.

Going back to the Polaris being a mainstream product, we can guess (educated OFC) that AMD is going to put a price tag for these GPUs at around 350 USD and below for the desktop parts, while the notebook parts are still shrouded in mystery and will most probably remain a secret until AMD’s partners decided to talk about the latest APUs with Polaris at COMPUTEX 2016. What we know is this: Polaris 10 will be the highest performing mainstream Polaris GPU with 8GB of VRAM, while the Polaris 11 will be the “super” mainstream one with 4GB of VRAM on board. Since they are mainstream, don’t expect AMD to go slappin’ HBM technology to these chips so GDDR5 and GDDR5X could be the most plausible options.

WCCF
Fury X Successor
R9 490X
R9 490
R9 470X
R9 470
GPU
Vega 10
Polaris 10
Polaris 10
Polaris 11
Polaris 11
Fabrication
14nm FinFET
14nm FinFET
14nm FinFET
14nm FinFET
14nm FinFET
Compute Units
64
TBA
36
20
16
GCN Generation
GCN 4.0
GCN 4.0
GCN 4.0
GCN 4.0
GCN 4.0
Stream Processors
4096
TBA
2304 SPs
1280
1024 SPs
TMUs
256
TBA
TBA
TBA
TBA
ROPs
64
TBA
TBA
TBA
TBA
Memory Bus
4096-bit
256-bit
256-bit
128-bit
128-bit
Memory
16GB HBM2
8GB GDDR5/X
8GB GDDR5/X
4GB GDDR5/X
4GB GDDR5/X
TDP
TBA
~110-130W
~110-130W
<50W
<50W

Table Taken From WCCFTECH

Now as for the green team, The Nvidia Pascal GPU family appears to be going out of its hiding place this coming Friday – which is timely for the reveal of Battlefield 5 and even more timely with the opening of DreamHack 2016. We received these reports via Gamers Nexus and props for their deeds along with the other members of the press by solving the puzzles together that is set by Nvidia. You can learn more about the reveal HERE, and play some parts of the puzzle yourself.

Polaris Pascal News (2)

Leaks and speculations are surrounding both company’s sub 20nm silicons, and if we are to quote AMD, Nvidia is taking the opportunity to put their Pascal GPUs at the high-end segment. That is at least according to AMD. If that is true, then Nvidia is certain to win the higher end market until AMD Vega arrives with its HBM1/2 technology and the same can be said for AMD’s mainstream grip with Polaris. We are not certain about these, but we do know that Nvidia is not willing to sacrifice a segment for the high-end part market share domination. It’s just not that profitable compared to the budget and mainstream categories. Doesn’t add up, really.

Both AMD and Nvidia are undoubtedly sizing themselves up, with Nvidia nearing the reveal, and AMD with a pre-launch tech event before May ends. Performance figures will most likely be revealed when both companies started to unveil the curtains of their sub 20nm architectures – allowing for further sizing, comparisons, and most importantly, optimization. Both companies will not take any chances when it comes to the latter specially if we’re going to take a look at the past with AMD’s 5000 Series GPUs. A huge and historical advantage for the Red Team when DX11 rolled up.

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