AMD "Ellesmere" ASIC Pictured Up Close in RX 480 PCB Picture Leak

[btarunr]

AMD's all-important Polaris10 "Ellesmere" ASIC is pictured up close in a 3-quarter PCB shot of the upcoming Radeon RX 480 / RX 470. The picture reveals the ASIC with a die that's significantly smaller than that of the 28 nm "Tonga" silicon. The "Ellesmere" die is built on the 14 nm FinFET+ process. The die is seated on a substrate with a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. This appears to be a common reference PCB between the RX 480 and the RX 470.

The RX 480 ships with a classy looking lateral-flow cooler that's longer than the PCB itself; while the RX 470 uses a more common fin-stack top-flow cooling solution. Of course both cards are expected to ship with custom-design boards and cooling solutions. The reference PCB draws power from a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, and uses a 6-phase VRM to condition it for the GPU and memory. Display outputs include three DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.0a connectors. There are also unused traces on the PCB for a DVI connector, so it's likely that some custom-design cards could feature it.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Caring1]

Reminds me of the old red ATI cards.

 

[r.h.p]

looking forward to seeing new AMD cards take the top spot

 

[the54thvoid]

looking forward to seeing new AMD cards take the top spot

These won't be the cards unfortunately. These should dominate mid range to performance, likely beating down the GTX970 and R9 390. If they match GTX980 and R9 390X, that would be pretty cool and some rumours say they will.

But they won't take the enthusiast top spot (GTX 1080).

 

[ZoneDymo]

These won't be the cards unfortunately. These should dominate mid range to performance, likely beating down the GTX970 and R9 390. If they match GTX980 and R9 390X, that would be pretty cool and some rumours say they will.

But they won't take the enthusiast top spot (GTX 1080).

well he never said enthusiast top spot soooo yeah.

 

[jaggerwild]

6 pins for the lose! LOLZ!

 

[Fluffmeister]

well he never said enthusiast top spot soooo yeah.

Well he never said mainstream top spot either. ;O

 

[dj-electric]

6 pins for the lose! LOLZ!

6PIN wasnt much of a lose in HD 6850 and its great OC capabilities

 

[the54thvoid]

well he never said enthusiast top spot soooo yeah.

Why are you so illogical? He said top spot. With no reference to anything else. Top spot. Not middle top. Bottom top. Top.

Sooooooooooooooooooo yeah.

Maybe Radeon Pro would be Top Spot but with occasional profile absences, the average would possibly drag it below GTX 1080.

 

[ZoneDymo]

Why are you so illogical? He said top spot. With no reference to anything else. Top spot. Not middle top. Bottom top. Top.

Sooooooooooooooooooo yeah.

Maybe Radeon Pro would be Top Spot but with occasional profile absences, the average would possibly drag it below GTX 1080.

Top spot as maybe top seller?
and nothing to do with performance?

 

[deu]

6 pins for the lose! LOLZ!

First people want low power consuption and suddenly they want high?! I dont get it. Why would it be a good thing to use more power!? The efficiency is off the roof on 16nm and 14nm and you just want it to use more power eventhough it performs better than former generations? Not to be harsh but I assume that your level of hardwareunderstanding amount to equating power usage to performance, but that is not how it works :0

 

[medi01]

6 pins for the lose! LOLZ!

AMD tends to pull less than specified 75w from PCIe (/looks at mainboard manufacturers)

 

[the54thvoid]

Top spot as maybe top seller?
and nothing to do with performance?

That is some top spot trolling zone....

 

[cdawall]

6 pins for the lose! LOLZ!

You know with this single 6pin this is supposed to offer more performance than your 780Ti right? It is also not a top end card.

 

[ZoneDymo]

That is some top spot trolling zone....

If you think so, you assumed he meant something, your mind went to that assumption right away and in that assumption you also made him wrong, instead of perhaps thinking of another way he could have meant it.

You can do with that as you wish, I pointed out an alternate and if you cannot accept that there are other top spots then in performance... (like sales, overclocking, price/performance, power consumption(/performance), etc) well I cannot help you any further Im afraid.

 

[G33k2Fr34k]

These won't be the cards unfortunately. These should dominate mid range to performance, likely beating down the GTX970 and R9 390. If they match GTX980 and R9 390X, that would be pretty cool and some rumours say they will.

But they won't take the enthusiast top spot (GTX 1080).

The 480 is faster than an overlocked GTX980. It's more of an R9 Fury replacement. Also, if the RX cards are good overclokers, then an overclocked 480 could get very close to the FuryX. We know from the GTX1070 that the 256bit GDDR5 memory subsystem of the card should be able to sustain FuryX level of graphics performance, so that's also a possibility.

 

[rav]

These won't be the cards unfortunately. These should dominate mid range to performance, likely beating down the GTX970 and R9 390. If they match GTX980 and R9 390X, that would be pretty cool and some rumours say they will.

But they won't take the enthusiast top spot (GTX 1080).

One RX 480 may not but spend $399.98 and 2 RX 480 in Crossfire crushes GTX 1080 in the AOTS DX12 benchmark. AMD Radeon GPU's are scalable!

GTX 1080 is also broken in DX12.

GTX 1080 despite being 16nm and clocked at 1.6gHz BARELY outperforms Radeon Fury X in AOTS benchmarks.
You may recall that Fury X is clocked at 1.05gHz and is last years Radeon top tier with 28nm process.

GTX 1080 should have bested Fury X by 20-30% in clock speed alone but failed miserably.

As I said nViida gpu's are broken running DX12 games.

And nVidia just announced that 3-4 way SLI will no longer be supported.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

One RX 480 may not but spend $399.98 and 2 RX 480 in Crossfire crushes GTX 1080 in the AOTS DX12 benchmark. AMD Radeon GPU's are scalable!

GTX 1080 is also broken in DX12.

GTX 1080 despite being 16nm and clocked at 1.6gHz BARELY outperforms Radeon Fury X in AOTS benchmarks.
You may recall that Fury X is clocked at 1.05gHz and is last years Radeon top tier with 28nm process.

GTX 1080 should have bested Fury X by 20-30% in clock speed alone but failed miserably.

As I said nViida gpu's are broken running DX12 games.

And nVidia just announced that 3-4 way SLI will no longer be supported.

Crossfire scaling has been a thing for over a decade man, the fact you can crossfire 480s is not a huge selling point, nor a big deal.

And anyone with half a brain would know that IPC != clockspeed. You cant compare clock to clock directly unless the GPUs are the same arch.

And nvidia's GPUs are far from broken in DX12. They dont do async compute, but they are not broken.

I swear, this generation of GPUs has brought out some real nutcases in the forums.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

First people want low power consuption and suddenly they want high?! I dont get it. Why would it be a good thing to use more power!? The efficiency is off the roof on 16nm and 14nm and you just want it to use more power eventhough it performs better than former generations? Not to be harsh but I assume that your level of hardwareunderstanding amount to equating power usage to performance, but that is not how it works :0

Sigh, Definitely agree with latter commenter saying that this generation of cards seems to be bringing with it an inordinately high number of trolls in all crazy directions intentionally misrepresenting the whole point of a post...6 pin=low power=great efficiency=low electric costs etc. However it's totally conceivable to say 14 nm vs 16nm will be similar in efficiency thus ONLY needing one 6 pin probably is a performance fail if you compare it to the 1080 crop of cards which aren't even the top of the Nvidia scale! They are high end performance like last generations gtx980 like I own, the gtx980ti was the top spot and again here there is a silicon significantly above the 1080 so yeah unless ATI has magic sauce in those gpus or has more higher end skus from examining that PCB it appears the top spots in pure performance are Nividias, like it or not.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

And yeah everyone who quoted him accurately said "hopefully these will take top spot", well, kinda hard to infer anything but the um very "top spot" no? Or do you infer that to mean the top spot of the 2nd highest tier of the 3rd lowest class of cards? Seriously, talk about performing pretzel-twist contortions to try and read into what he said things he didn't say whatsoever. I hope the AMD cards are awesome, competition means we win, but not knowing anything else it's perfectly legit to see a single 6 pin connector with all the rest of the pcb specs and think this will be middle/high end range with no intent on taking "top spot"....

 

[ZoneDymo]

And yeah everyone who quoted him accurately said "hopefully these will take top spot", well, kinda hard to infer anything but the um very "top spot" no? Or do you infer that to mean the top spot of the 2nd highest tier of the 3rd lowest class of cards? Seriously, talk about performing pretzel-twist contortions to try and read into what he said things he didn't say whatsoever. I hope the AMD cards are awesome, competition means we win, but not knowing anything else it's perfectly legit to see a single 6 pin connector with all the rest of the pcb specs and think this will be middle/high end range with no intent on taking "top spot"....

Like I said, top spot in performance, top spot in overclocking potential, top spot in performance per watt and in this case I would think top spot in sales (which is ultimately the most important for a company and AMD can use that).

 

[TRWOV]

Waiting for the inevitable ITX version

 

[dalekdukesboy]

Yeah, if you think one of us here as consumer tech-geek pc and gaming enthusiasts really are going to even look at a sexy new card architecture and immediately drooling with delight say "top spot" thinking how much the thing sells in mass volume....I've got a bridge or two to sell you.

 

[ZoneDymo]

Yeah, if you think one of us here as consumer tech-geek pc and gaming enthusiasts really are going to even look at a sexy new card architecture and immediately drooling with delight say "top spot" thinking how much the thing sells in mass volume....I've got a bridge or two to sell you.

I dont think you hang around here that much then.
People are constantly talking about sales, how much something has sold, how much it will sale, how good that will be for the company, how much its needed, market share, just constantly sooo yeah.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

....Answer me this, do you really think when someone is announcing a relatively high end new architecture when one of us is wondering about it that the first or even second thing we think about is sales volume? Yeah, obviously that matters but unless it's so bad compared to its' competition it looks like a turd baking in the sun AMD and NVIDIA are very safe from going out of business despite years of worries rightfully so about AMD faltering a bit...but still I defy you to tell me the first thing on a tech geek consumers mind is "Gee wonder if this new product will sell?" I can almost guarantee you first question is how well does it perform? or How efficient is it? or How hot does it run? So the point IS NOT whether sales/market etc is discussed for it IS but the fact that as consumers anxiously awaiting a new product how it sells is not first thing we will think of, maybe not even the 3rd or 4th thing unless we work for Nivida or AMD.