Mobile Polaris Discussion

What are your thoughts on AMD's upcoming mobile graphics cards? I was a bit surprised to learn from their recent presentation that they haven't given up completely on mobile gaming hardware.







Apparently 'Polaris' is not quite comparable to the traditional family of GPUs we have seen in the past - instead it is an umbrella term that covers disparate hardware, including both GDDR5 and HBM parts:

As for the mobile gaming cards, it seems their goal is 'console caliber performance in a thin and light notebook':

 

"Console-caliber performance in a thin and light notebook"
Ok, I already dislike your statement that "console-caliber" is acceptable. Not that it isn't already achieve-able with 960M cards.

That being said, none of this means anything if the specs itself suck, or if it's hot like all other GCN cards are.

I sincerely hope great things come from this.

 

Let's wait and see

 

I'm definitely exceeding console-caliber graphics with this relatively weak 960m.

 

AMD's statement, not mine!

There have been some rumors however, that they will update the Xbox with a Polaris card.

 

The GPU they tested against GTX 950 is def perfect for mobile.

Load voltage is 0.83V which is even lower than idle voltage of today`s GPUs. The system consumed about 85W, so I`m guessing thats a 30W GPU performing like a 90W Maxwell which is very impressive.

It also seems like low/midrange Polaris will be 14nm due to that process have a target voltage of 0.8V. Beefier GPUs need more voltage so like Anandtech says, AMD will use both 16nm and 14nm this time.
Laptops could only get 14nm perhaps. Its also confirmed that AMD will use both GDDR5 and HBM for their Polaris GPUs. So like I thought earlier, no HBM for mobile (its tricky with current MXM specifications).

AMD is ready for notebooks once again so yay. The one way Nvidia street during the several last years have been booooring

 

I know it's theirs.

That does nothing; the performance will still equate to that of its current piss-poor card.

 

Will it MXM-B? That's all I care about.

 

Just looking at notebookcheck's list of GPUs, that puts this specific Polaris GPU inbetween the GTX 965m and GTX 880m.
For a mid-range mobile GPU, that looks to be pretty good. Better than their R9 m385x that's for sure, but I hope AMD doesn't call this test GPU the R9 m480x.

 

Seems we will see the first Polaris laptops before the end of Q3:

(google translation) from Lisa Su interview with http://www.computerbase.de/2016-01/amd-ceo-lisa-su-interview/