Polaris 10 and 11 have long been tagged as releasing at Computex later this year. As we know from AMD directly, Polaris 10 will be the flagship chip while Polaris 11 will fill in the gap below. Previously, the expectation has been that Polaris 10 would do battle against GP104/GTX 1080 when that card launched. Now it seems that the card won’t be as high performing as we’ve come to expect.
According to the source, Polaris 10 won’t be the R9 490 and 490X we’ve come to expect as the GP104 challenger. Instead, the approximately 2304 core GPU (up to 2560) will be branded as the R9 480 or 480X. This is largely based on the clock speeds which have been reported as between 800-1050Mhz and the TDP of 110-135W. It’s hard to see how a 125W GPU will match the approx 250W GP104 that Nvidia will launch. Polaris 11 has also had its TDP leaked at 50W which is actually a bit higher than expected.
There is still some hope though as this information is reportedly from last month that has finally leaked out. This means AMD could have tweaked the TDP and clock speeds higher since then, perhaps to around 1200Mhz and 150W+ TDP. AMD has also introduced massive tweaks to GCN to achieve greater efficiency along with the move to 14nm. Nvidia may also have chosen to reintroduce FP64 compute units to Pascal GeForce which could take as much as 30% of the TDP, putting the GP104 at a real 200W worth of gaming performance. Either way, the battle between AMD and Nvidia will be heating up at Computex.
