From PC World: AMD's new Polaris graphics architecture ushers in a fourth-generation graphics core, unheard of power efficiency, and perhaps more importantly for the company, hope.
The company said Monday that Polaris will pack a mostly redesigned GPU including the new fourth-gen GCN cores, a new memory controller, new multimedia cores, and a new geometry processor. Perhaps more importantly, it'll be just as fast as a comparable Nvidia part, while using a lot less power, the company said.
In a demo to the press, AMD showed off a PC with an early Polaris GPU running Star Wars Battlefield at 1920x1080 resolution at 60 fps and consuming just 86 watts. The exact same system outfitted with a GeForce GTX 950 consumed 140 watts. AMD used desktop parts to sub in for laptop parts as it didn't have mobile components yet, but the chip will initially be aimed at laptops and more entry-level desktop graphics cards.
Polaris chips will support both HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3. The new chips are also capable of encoding and decoding H.265 video up to 4K resolution. That's it for details on the new GCN, other than high-level bullet points like "improved shader efficiency," "memory compression," "better instruction pre-fetch," and such.
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