AMD Polaris Rumors and Discussion

Sounds like AMD will be branding the Polaris line for laptops as 5xxM, before the 4xxM line ever even existed:

http://videocardz.com/65315/amd-radeon-rx-560m-to-become-the-first-radeon-rx-500-series-card

Unless this is that Polaris 12 chip, the RX 560M totally looks like a Polaris 11 given the nvidia GPUs available for the same model.

 

Actually it will probably be RX 560, not 560M, and RX 460M doesn't exist because mobile version of RX 460 does (even if it's in just 1 laptop, HP Omen)

So they used the same naming as NVIDIA did, leaving the "M" from the name
edit: and yes, mobile RX 460 is Polaris 11

 

XFX RX 460 4GB Slim Review
https://lanoc.org/review/video-cards/7426-xfx-rx-460-4gb-slim?showall=

 

Apparently Sapphire decided to release a RX460 with a fully enabled Polaris 11:

http://www.sapphiretech.com/productdetial.asp?pid=56115CC4-8337-4B66-BD42-7F0AB5571C00&lang=chs

Too bad it's yet another needlessly gigantic card.

 

… and too bad it's (again, like 470D) a china-only product.

 

I wonder why it's China-only.

The 470D made sense because it was a heavily salvaged Polaris 10 with margins so lean that even the transportation costs out of China were too much. So they only sell it in China in order to efficiently utilize those partially defective Polaris 10 die.

But this is the opposite situation. This appears to be a fully enabled Polaris 11 die, which should be pretty valuable. Hell, the common rumor is that Apple needed so many fully enabled Polaris 11 for the MBP that the 460 had to make do with a partially enabled die.

So I don't really understand why this would be China only.

Maybe Apple's demand has tapered and amd is "accidentally" sending sapphire some Polaris 11 die that have fully functional resources? That way, sapphire knows they can get a premium from these select chips, but they don't have enough for a global product, so they just do a limited run for China?

Any thoughts are appreciated. I'm at a loss.

 

Good point! Never thought of that.

 

I can't take credit for that one, someone else pointed it out back when that happened. But yeah, export and specialized transportation costs are probably not insignificant for these kinds of products.

Or maybe there's a simpler explanation that the Chinese market is hot & heavy in the $100-200 moba-worthy space, so a cut down Polaris 10 and fully enabled Polaris 11 help close the massive gap between the two chips.

I remember the days when we had a separate card every $15 or so from $100ish up to $200ish (Anandtech had some commentary on that technique at the end of their intro).

That practice seems to have fell by the way side now that the western market is more mature/saturated, but I bet the Chinese market still benefits from that increased granularity in available options in order to eek out every last dollar that a consumer is willing to spend.

 

Public opinion on the new Macbook Pros has been dismal, to say the least. I don't know about actual sales, though.

 

I don't think it makes sense though that apple would need all good dies regardless how well it sells. There's 2 standard configurations of the 15" MBP, and neither of them has the fully enabled chip, it's an optional upgrade on both of them.
Plus on the desktop you could probably sell fully functional chips which are a bit too power hungry for mobile anyway...

 

Apple is a bit of a titan when it comes to making and maintaining supply deals.

Even if the MBPs selling today aren't using those Polaris 11 die, then they could be stockpiling for an iMac update or something like that.

I don't know that industry terribly well, but I'd be amazed if Apple wasn't on point when it came to ensuring a steady supply chain for the laundry list of necessary parts. They have way too much unrepatriated cash sitting around in China not to be utilizing it smartly to smooth out their supply lines (buy in bulk, hold reserves, etc).

 

Well I don't think the lack of Polaris 11 laptops during the second half of 2016 made any sense either..

 

I'm thinking it's china only for now, and the rest of the world will get it later this year as RX 560

 

That strat (with apple instead of china) worked really well with Tonga already. Not.

 

Well we do need a RX 560 anyhow, and there's no new chips to fill that position (excluding perhaps the fabled Polaris 12, whatever it really ends up being)

 

Ha! Define "we" please. I for one surely do not need it, if it's just a new name. And AMD already has set aside 5s as end digits for refreshes. And wrt to Vega, I fully expect them to carry a moniker akin to Fiji GPUs, so they stand outside the regular nomenklature. No reason other than silly OEMs for costly rebranding.

 

It doesn't mean they'll use it. It's the same as previous generations.

Keep in mind that cards named RX 560M and RX570 already exist in laptops.

 

R9 285? And that was not even a 2nd revision product.

 

Exactly. They just used it as something to fit in without a new gen. This time it's most likely that they will do a full new gen with new Vega cards as well as Polaris rebrands.

 

They sell like hot cakes. There is a lot of nerd rage but it ends up being uncorrelated to sales. We can very easily go read a 100 or a 1000 posts and comments that say "I've been stuck with 16GB RAM for five years!", "This is a Macbook Air not Pro", "that's it, I'm fed up, going to Windows 10/Linux/something" but a million other people don't care, don't know or eat it up.

It might be the filtering bubble effect, it might be Apple caring about sales figures and not caring about alienating users - perhaps more people only use it for writing blogs than people will leave due to weak thermals, inability to add internal storage or other blocking issues. Other people will edit pictures or video but don't care as they outsourced the technical choices to Apple.