AMD sets a new course for Radeons with its Polaris architecture [TechReport]

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At AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) tech summit last month, corporate vice president, product CTO, and corporate fellow Joe Macri described fabrication process advances as being “like Christmas” for the company’s engineers. The last time the company took the wrapping paper off a graphics card benefiting from a process tech advance was late 2011’s Radeon HD 7970 and its 28-nm Tahiti GPU. Since then, GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia have been fabricated on 28-nm process technology.

That long period of process stagnation is coming to an end. Around the middle of this year, AMD will release GPUs built with a new architecture it's calling Polaris, and those chips will be made using FinFETs, a type of 3D transistor. FinFETs bring some tantalizing improvements for performance and power efficiency to the table. Judging by the company's excitement over Polaris, FinFETs are just the kind of Christmas present the company's engineers have waited so long for.

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Why a reformed AMD is going all in on VR, rather than badmouthing Nvidia
"In the past we used to reference our competition, but now it's just about us."

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]"If you look at the total install base of a Radeon 290, or a GTX 970 or above [the minimum specs required for VR], it's around 7.5 million units," explained Taylor. "But the issue is that if a publisher wants to sell a £40/$50 VR game, there's not a big enough market to justify that yet. We've got to prime the pumps, which means somebody has got to start writing cheques to big games publishers. Or we've got to increase the install TAM [total addressable market].

"The reason Polaris is a big deal," continued Taylor, "is because I believe we will be able to grow that TAM significantly. I don't think Nvidia is going to do anything to increase the TAM, because according to everything we've seen around Pascal, it's a high-end part. I don't know what the price is gonna be, but let's say it's as low as £500/$600 and as high as £800/$1000. That price range is not going to expand the TAM for VR. We're going on the record right now to say Polaris will expand the TAM. Full stop."

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Read full article at Source (arstechnica)