Tuesday, April 26th 2016

AMD Polaris 10 "Ellesmere" as Fast as GTX 980 Ti: Rumor
At a presser in Taiwan for its Radeon Pro Duo launch, AMD talked extensively about its upcoming "Polaris" and "Vega" family of GPUs. The company appears to be betting heavily on two SKUs it plans to launch this June, Polaris 10 and Polaris 11. Polaris 10 is an internal designation to Radeon R9 490(X), based on the 14 nm "Ellesmere" silicon. It may be the biggest chip AMD builds on the "Polaris" architecture, but it won't exactly be a "big chip," in that it doesn't succeed "Fiji." That honor is reserved for "Vega," which debuts in early-2017.
The "Ellesmere" silicon is more of AMD's competitor to NVIDIA's GP104. It is rumored that the R9 490(X), based on this silicon, will offer consumers performance rivaling the GeForce GTX 980 Ti (ergo faster than the Radeon R9 Fury X), at a USD $300-ish price point. "Ellesmere" will be a lean-machine, physically featuring up to 2,560 4th generation GCN stream processors (2,304 enabled on Polaris 10), a possible 256-bit GDDR5X memory interface, and a deep sub-200W typical board power rating.
Source:
GameDebate
The "Ellesmere" silicon is more of AMD's competitor to NVIDIA's GP104. It is rumored that the R9 490(X), based on this silicon, will offer consumers performance rivaling the GeForce GTX 980 Ti (ergo faster than the Radeon R9 Fury X), at a USD $300-ish price point. "Ellesmere" will be a lean-machine, physically featuring up to 2,560 4th generation GCN stream processors (2,304 enabled on Polaris 10), a possible 256-bit GDDR5X memory interface, and a deep sub-200W typical board power rating.
91 Comments on AMD Polaris 10 "Ellesmere" as Fast as GTX 980 Ti: Rumor
Personally i imagine AMD will want to make profit as many as possibble. So the best thing for amd to do is wait for nvidia to launch first (to set the price point) and then try to counter nvidia offering appropriately. Maybe they want to undercut nvidia a bit. If they undercut nvidia too much then nvidia might retaliate with with price war. With financial situation of both company which one have more 'ammo' for long term price war?
But then, I smell a hint of guerilla reverse-marketing.
If they are releasing in June, the chips are off the fab line and to the PCB line already. Wonder if there will be anymore leaks before then?
We are going to be looking at upscaled 1080p probably.
On a side note, AMD getting the console deals (for the current and next gen) and pushing with mantle was the worst possible thing that could have happened to nvidia. With low level apis etc and the need to extract every bit of performance of a console, developers will make games aggressively optimized to multi threading and GCN architecture using the low level apis. Given the state of the console ports to pc, nvidia will start to struggle in a not distant future... Keep in mind that the console market generate several times higher profit than pc. If you look at this AMD will have nearly 90% of the gaming market if you take into account consoles... It makes sense to develop for AMD's hardware doesn't it?
Nawh, not gonna happen.
If it offers GTX 980 Ti performance (which is sweet BTW :D), then it's gonna be priced accordingly.
Depends how they price the next flagship and how much off the 490 is from the 490X. But they could do it like they did with the 290 and 290X where the difference is less than 10% yet the price is much lower.
Since when AMD even shares their final pricing with their AIBs 2 months before the announcement? Not even before 2 wks, they generally give a reference price 1 or 2 wks before so AIBs .
doesn't even make sense as they also are waiting for nvidia to reveal their hand (pricing) as they are planning to announce their new stuff before AMD.
And the reason why AMD get's a bigger "relative boost" from Direct3D 12 is that Nvidia decided to apply the Direct3D 12 driver side optimizations to all API versions, which in turns results in little relative gain between version 11 and 12. Everyone who follows the technology should know this (1)(2). I don't know if people just fall asleep when we get to the technical details, or if people suffer from "selective memory loss". ;)
- R9-470 (Polaris11-Pro, 4GB GDDR5, R9-380-Performance, $180)
- R9-470x (Polaris11-XT, 4GB GDDR5x, R9-380x Performance, $230)
- R9-480 (Polaris10-Pro, 4GB GDDR5, R9-390/R9-290x performance, $270)
- R9-480 (Polaris10-Pro, 8GB GDDR5x, R9-390x/Fury performance, $350)
- R9-480x (Polaris10-XT, 8GB GDDR5x, Fury-X performance, $420)
Vega will be out around March of 2017, and AMD will respin Polaris with MUCH higher ClockSpeeds.
- R9-570 (Polaris11-Pro, 4GB GDDR5, R9-290-Performance, $200)
- R9-570x (Polaris11-XT, 4GB GDDR5x, R9-290x Performance, $250)
- R9-580 (Polaris10-Pro, 8GB GDDR5x, +20% Fury Performance performance, $370)
- R9-580x (Polaris10-XT, 8GB GDDR5x, +25% Fury-X performance, $450)
- R9-590 (Vega-Pro, 8GB HBM2, +70% Fury-X performance, $600)
- R9-590x (Vega-Pro 16GB HBM2 +85% Fury-X performance, $800)
- R9-Rage-X (Vega-XT, 32GB HBM2, 2.3x Fury-X performance, $1100)
GP104 said to be around +300mm²
Edit R9 390 and GTX 970 is around 240 in Europe. AMD said they will target this market, but we dont know with what card. Am dreaming its Polaris 11 :)
The R7-470 is reportedly coming to laptops before desktops, so we may not see it until later in the year. At <50W, it will not be as strong as a R9-380, but somewhere between the 370 and 380 and be priced <$150.
The R9-480 will perform a bit below the R9-390 and GTX 970, and will be priced ~$250. This one will come out this summer, and force modest adjustments in older cards in this range.
Pascal cards introduced this summer (1070 and 1080) will be higher end and won't compete directly with Polaris. The 1070 will compete with Fury though, and force some price adjustments.
So, that's my crystal ball. No big shakeups or big price drops.