AMD's upcoming Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 graphics chips won't be
powering high-end graphics cards, according to recent comments by AMD.
In its latest financial report, the company noted that Polaris 11 would
target "the notebook market," while Polaris 10 would target "the
mainstream desktop and high-end gaming notebook segment."
In an interview with Ars,
AMD's Roy Taylor also confirmed that Polaris would target mainstream
users, particularly those interested in creating a VR-ready system.
"The reason Polaris is a big deal, is because I believe we will be
able to grow that TAM [total addressable market] significantly," said
Taylor. "I don't think Nvidia is going to do anything to increase the
TAM, because according to everything we've seen around Pascal, it's a
high-end part. I don't know what the price is gonna be, but let's say
it's as low as £500/$600 and as high as £800/$1000. That price range is
not going to expand the TAM for VR. We're going on the record right now
to say Polaris will expand the TAM. Full stop."
While those after a successor to the likes of high-end graphics cards like the Fury and Fury X may
be disappointed, that Polaris is a mainstream part doesn't necessarily
mean it's underpowered. The minimum specs for a VR system call for an
Nvidia GTX 970 or an AMD Radeon 290 (or its near-identical replacement
the 390), both of which currently retail for around £250.
"If you look at the total install base of a Radeon 290, or a GTX 970,
or above, it's 7.5 million units. But the issue is that if a publisher
wants to sell a £40/$50 game, that's not a big enough market to justify
that yet. We've got to prime the pumps, which means somebody has got to
start writing cheques to big games publishers. Or we've got to increase
the install TAM."
AMD's recent statements are seemingly contrary to those made by its graphics head,
Raja Koduri, in January of this year. In an interview with VentureBeat,
Koduri explained that one of the Polaris GPUs was a larger,
high-performance GPU designed to take back the premium graphics card
market currently dominated by rival Nvidia. It now appears that he was
simply referring to bringing high-performance down to a more reasonable
price point.
"When we set out to design this GPU, we set a completely different
goal than for the usual way the PC road maps go," explained Koduri at
the time. "Those are driven by 'the benchmark score this year is X. Next
year we need to target 20 percent better at this cost and this power.'
We decided to do something exciting with this GPU. Let's spike it so we
can accomplish something we hadn't accomplished before."
Full details on AMD's Polaris graphics cards are expected at Computex
at the end of May, while Nvidia is expected to reveal details on its
Pascal graphics architecture around the same time. Both of the upcoming
products have been through the rumour mill multiple times, with some
suggesting that Polaris will continue to use HBM1—thus limiting the cards to 4GB of memory—while others suggest that they'll simply use plain old GDDR5.
Meanwhile, Nvidia unveiled its first Pascal graphics card, the monstrous Tesla P100,
which is designed for data centres. While the P100 features HBM2
memory—with a crazy-wide 4096-bit bus—rumours suggest the consumer cards
will use GDDR5X, an improved version of GDDR5 intended to compete with
HBM. There have even been a few shots of the PCB and shroud for the Pascal cards, but take those with a very large grain of salt.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/04/amd-polaris-will-be-a-mainstream-gpu/
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