Friday, July 29th 2016
AMD Polaris 11 "Baffin" ASIC Pictured Up Close
AMD's upcoming 14 nm Polaris 11 "Baffin" ASIC, which powers the Radeon RX 460, was pictured up close, and it's tiny! Pictured as part of a Sapphire Radeon RX 460 Dual-X disassembly by PCOnline.com.cn, the Polaris 11 chip features a tiny package substrate owing to its low pin-count, wiring out a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface; a PCI-Express 3.0 x8 host interface (it fits into x16 slots but has wiring for just x8); and electrical pins to cope with its <75W TDP requirements. The card relies on the PCI-Express slot for all its power draw. Sapphire's Dual-X cooling solution looks beefy from the outside owing to its cooler shroud and pair of fans, but underneath is a fairly simple monoblock aluminium heatsink.
Sources:
PCOnline.com.cn, VideoCardz
46 Comments on AMD Polaris 11 "Baffin" ASIC Pictured Up Close
Pretty excited to see something 20% stronger than a PS4 finally fit into a low-profile form factor.
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RX480 also states made in Taiwan. ugh.
I feel sorry for the people who get suckered into buying this hunk of junk. That cooler has so much aluminium it's probably worth more than the board itself...
If a card is small, it is seen as less powerful and not as good.
By keeping Graphics Cards a certain size, expectations are met and people feel they are getting value for money.
But at the same time it looks like they could of made it low profile compatible and gave a it a interchangeable bracket.
Perhaps its the process its on is less forgiving of heat.
Perhaps the die size interface area needs such a large heatsink.
Btw, the problem with 16nm chips is that they are tiny. Which means, even if they are energy efficient, the heat is a lot more focused because they are tiny. Meaning it's hard to efficiently take heat away from it. That's the problem both NVIDIA and AMD are facing thee days on 16nm... Especially on mid end models which are really tiny but fast enough to produce decent amount of heat...
Might be a good chip as I have the impression the GloFo Polaris is suffering from some process issues at this point. Basically what we saw when TSMC started their 28nm process, and why there was then the 7970 GHz and why Nvidia was late with a GTX 680/670 as they waited until TSMC fixed their issue.