When Polaris first made the news, it seemed that AMD had a real winner with dramatically improved efficiency and performance. Now that the cards have launched, we know that while impressive, AMD is still behind the curve a bit compared to Nvidia in the efficiency game. According to a new report though, the company is working on new revisions of their Polaris GPUs with up to 50% better performance per watt.
The dramatic increase in efficiency is reportedly coming from a revamped 14nm process from Global Foundries combined with some design tweaks. Somehow, AMD has managed to cut the Polaris 10 TDP from 150W down to about 95W and Polaris 11 will likely drop significantly below the 75W mark. The plan is for these revamped Polaris GPUs to hit the mobile market where efficiency is king.
For now, there is no word yet if the new variants will come to the desktop market. AMD has hinted in that past that they intend to launch tweaked versions of Polaris like the RX 485 with improved performance. Perhaps the new 14nm process and tweaked architecture will allow for higher stock and overclocked speeds while maintaining a similar power consumption. With Vega 10 set to launch in a few months, it might be a great time to tweak their desktop Polaris offerings as well.
