News

Polaris 10 and 11 Core Specifications Revealed

From AMD has told us so far, Polaris 10 is the mainstream GPU while Polaris 11 follows up as the budget card. Dubbed Ellesmere and Baffin respectively, they are part of AMD’s strategy to start off with small dies. Up until now, we’ve only had rumoured performance figures, with Ellesmere hovering about a 980Ti in performance. This all changes today with the latest rumours to come out.

Polaris 10 was previously expected to come in at 40CUs but the new report suggests 32CUs. Assuming AMD keeps the 64 stream processor counter per CU, this means a total core count of 2048, not 2560 as expected. At the same time, AMD has managed to squeeze out 5.5 TFLOPs, around the 5.9 TFLOPs offered by Hawaii. Given that theoretical TFLOPs is based on core count x core clock, this suggests a pretty high clockspeed for Polaris 10, likely around 1300-1400 Mhz. AMD has also managed to cut down power consumption to around 150W, with a 256bit bus of 8GB 7Gbps GDDR5.

Polaris 11 features a much lower CU count at 14, giving us about 896 stream processors. If we give the same clock speed boost as Ellesmere received, this would give us about R9 270/270X levels of performance, just ahead of the GTX 950. There will be 4GB of GDDR5 over a 128bit bus and 2.5TFLOPs of theoretical performance. Polaris also adds HVEC/H.265 hardware encode/decode acceleration, DisplayPort 1.3, and HDMI 2.0b outputs

The biggest question is how well these theoretical numbers map out to real world performance. AMD has done a lot of work to Polaris and GCN 4.0 so I expect that Ellesmere will surge ahead of the R9 380X clock for clock. Fiji had 8TFLOPs of theoretical performance but did not scale very well so there is definitely a lot of room for GCN 4.0 to improve on There’s also the question of overclocking as AMD seems to have gone a bit conservative with their clock speeds. Overall Polaris looks to be very promising and I can’t wait to see some cards!

Samuel Wan

Samuel joined eTeknix in 2015 after becoming engrossed in technology and PC hardware. With his passion for gaming and hardware, tech writing was the logical step to share the latest news with the world. When he’s not busy dreaming about the latest hardware, he enjoys gaming, music, camping and reading.

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 Possible Price Revealed

According to a new report, the GeForce RTX 5090 GPU will be very expensive. It…

10 hours ago

AMD Krackan Processor with 6 Zen 5 and Zen 5c Cores for Budget AI Laptops Leaked

A new AMD processor in the form of an engineering model has been leaked in…

10 hours ago

SK Hynix Begins Production of First 321-Layer NAND Chips

SK Hynix has claimed to be the first company to mass-produce 321-layer NAND memory chips.…

10 hours ago

Trust Gaming GXT 609 Zoxa 2.0 PC Speakers

SOUNDS GREAT – Full stereo sound (12W peak power) gives your setup a booming audio…

14 hours ago

PowerA Wired Controller for Nintendo Switch

Special Edition Yoshi design Ergonomic controller shape with Nintendo Switch button layout Detachable 10ft (3m)…

14 hours ago

Logitech G Saitek PRO Flight Rudder Pedals

Fluid Motion: These flight rudder pedals are smooth and accurate that enable precise control over…

14 hours ago