AMD Polaris 10 and 11 are Ellesmere and Baffin – Polaris 10 Specification Spotted

With just about 2 months to launch, it is inevitable that more details about Polaris are going to leak out. According to a patch submitted by AMD, it appears that Polaris 10 and 11 are the same chips previously leaked as Ellesmere and Baffin respectively. Furthermore, it appears that Ellesmere will be an R9 390/390X configuration replacement but offer Fury X like performance.

According to the patch, Polaris 10, the top end Polaris chip is codenamed Ellesmere while Baffin is Polaris 11. This collaborates previously released information that Ellesmere, Baffin and Greenland would be launching soon. While Baffin has been spotted shipping, Ellesmere has not, suggesting it is either a bigger more complex die or the higher end product AMD wants to keep under wraps.

Finally, we are getting some more specifications for Polaris 10. According to benchmarks spotted online, one Ellesmere configuration will be 2304 GCN cores in 32CUs running at 800-1000mhz. The chip will also have a 256bit memory bus and 8GB of VRAM running at 1500Mhz (7500Mhz effective). This places the card as a solid replacement for the 390/390X segment with a 2560 core unit being the top model. The reduced memory bus width is offset by AMD’s lossless texture compression and increased GDDR5 clocks.

Given the gains from 14nm and the new Polaris GCN architecture, it wouldn’t be unexpected for a 2560 core unit to beat Fury X as shown in the Hitman demo. This means AMD has managed to bump GCN performance by about 30%, the biggest from them since GCN was originally launched. With Pascal not expected to give much of a boost, AMD may finally seize the performance/efficiency crown from Nvidia.