After a very lengthy relationship with the original GCN architecture, AMD is set to move on later this year. Polaris has been billed as the next-generation architecture, taking on the GCN 4.0 moniker. So far, we have confirmation that there will be Polaris 10 and 11, each targeting the higher and lower ends of the market. Today, we’re getting word that Polaris 11 will be the chip powering the upcoming R9 M480 GPU.
Polaris 11 powering the mobile GPUs isn’t much of a surprise as AMD has already confirmed that the chip would be”targeting the notebook market”. The bigger surprise is that it’s powering a chip as high as the R9 M480(X). The Polaris 10 is supposed to power the high-end gaming notebooks so that only leaves the R9 M490(X) left. This means either Polaris 10 and 11 are closer than we expected or it will be a severely cut down Polaris 10.
Finally, we saw some specifications for the M480. It will reportedly feature 4GB of GDDR5 clocked at 1250Mhz and a core clock of 1000Mhz. The memory bus is a relatively narrow 128bit but that should be enough given the performance and the delta colour compression. Polaris 11 is to feature at least 1280 stream processors but it remains to be seen which SKU will the M480 use.
