AMD's new GPU architecture "Polaris" and GPU development prospects explained by development managers

At the International IT Trade Show CES 2016, AMD, a semiconductor giant, announced the next-generation GPU architecture "Poraris (Polaris)We announced. In recent years, although AMD is behind NVIDIA in the graphic board market, the graphic development officer thinks that the reversal offense of AMD will be started by Polaris released in 2016.

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Mr. Raja Kodri, top graphic developer of AMD at CES 2016 venueVentureBeatIn response to the interview, I am talking about AMD's Polaris architecture and the stance to the VR market, and future directions of AMD graphics.


◆ Current situation and direction
AMD, which manufactures not only GPUs but also CPUs, has integrated "GPU functions within CPU"APU"As a result of the effort to develop the graphics built-in CPU could achieve graphic performance that exceeded the biggest Intel, but in pure GPU function rival NVIDIA has been made a big difference.

By now the current NVIDIA graphic board market share has expanded to more than 80%, AMD is planning to strengthen pure GPU in the future to improve the situation which was totally different, Mr. Kodri reveals that he set up an independent graphic department for that purpose.

◆ What is Polaris
·brand name
The first part of GPU performance enhancement is "Polaris" of the new GPU architecture, but about the question "Is AMD's graphics brand" Radeon "to" Polaris "?", Mr. Kodri said "Radeon brand is We will continue. "

Polaris is accurately positioned as a "microarchitecture" showing the basic design of multiple elements such as chip design and manufacturing process technology, and AMD who never brand name micro architecture has named "Polaris" for the first time There is a wish to use it for a brand strategy. For this reason, it can be said that it was no use helping the Polaris misunderstood as one brand name of the graphic board.


According to Mr. Kodri said that it was difficult to understand which chip family belongs to AMD users and media, and even to their own AMD developers, due to the lack of brand name on micro architecture so far Thing. In the future, products after the Polaris generation seem to be easier to distinguish products by architecture name.

·support
Polaris supports HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3, which eliminates the disadvantages of the Radeon series which DisplayPort could not output 4K. It also supports 4K decoding at H.265 main 10 Profile and 4K encode at 60fps. Mr. Kodri thinks that low price 4K display will be popularized by Polaris 4K full support.

· Two types of Polaris
Mr. Koduri says that it is Polaris that it felt the necessity of a GPU that raised power efficiency from the demand for gaming notebook PC which is playing a game with a thin notebook PC and that it can fulfill that demand. Because Polaris is manufactured with 14 nm FinFET, it has extremely high power saving performance.

In the demonstration at the CES 2016 venue, Polaris's power-saving performance of using Polaris adopted only 86 watts to achieve equivalent performance in Polaris adopted GPUs when it was power consumption of rival NVIDIA graphics board GTX 950 GTX 950 It was appealing.


In addition, Polaris has a high-end GPU as its successor to "Radeon R9 Fury X"Polaris 11"For high-end laptop computers and middle range desktop PCsPolaris 10Mr. Kodri reveals that there are two kinds of. Mr. Kodri said that they are power efficient GPUs that will achieve the most innovative performance up to now.

In Polaris, HBM 2 (High Bandwidth Memory2) and GDDR 5, the former will be for high-end GPUs, the latter will be for GPUs below middle range. Polaris seems likely to be a fulfilling lineup by performance and price.

About VR
Mr. Koduri is positioning 2016 as the year of arrival of VR, Oculus'sRift, We expect that various VR headset products will appear, and corresponding content will increase. High graphic performance is required to bring out the performance of the VR headset, and it can be handled with a graphic board such as Polaris. Even the current R9 Fury X has reached 8 teraflops, while the performance of PS 4 is 2 TeraFLOPS, GPU will further improve performance with the appearance of Polaris.


In addition, it is necessary to break down the current state that true VR break can correspond only to high-end PC, and by realizing the current electric power performance requiring 200 W electric power for VR output at 5 W, complete When the VR experience is completed, Mr. Kodli thinks and it seems that he plans to upgrade GPU performance on Mobile SoC as well.


In addition, Mr. Kodri said, "If we can output 16 K (16 times the resolution of 4 K) at 240 Hz, it may be possible to get a real immersion in VR," he says, seeking further improvements in GPU performance . Moreover, "The ultimate goal of the GPU is to get the quality of a small mirror", so it is that no matter how cheap a mirror it can express the outside world in a precise and accurate manner, and the graphic board is ultimately It should have similar reproducibility. It is likely that the performance of AMD's graphic board will continue to improve still more thanks to the intense challenge spirit of development top.