AMD announces Polaris at the end of May

For the first time ever, Dreamhack was held in Austin, located in the US state of Texas, something Nvidia celebrated by announcing the Geforce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The launch of the new flagship will take place later in May and will be followed by the cheaper sibling in June.

Now the Thai enthusiast site Zolkorn reports that AMD will counter Nvidia’s new architecture Pascal within the next few weeks. According to the information, the rival is planning a press event with the architecture Polaris in focus between 26-29 May on the Chinese peninsula Macao.

Furthermore, the report says that neither the date nor the place is a coincidence, but selected to coincide with the journalist corps’ trips to the electronics fair Computex, which is held in nearby Taipei, Taiwan, on 31 May. It is therefore highly probable that the fair will act as a launching platform for the company’s new graphics series.

Polaris is the code name for AMD’s fourth generation Graphics Core Next, which is said to have undergone radical changes in order to deliver both higher performance and energy efficiency. One part of this is that the company is switching to production of 14 nanometers from Globalfoundries or Samsung, unlike Nvidia, which with Pascal relies on TSMC’s 16-nanometer technology.

The architecture consists of two graphics circuits named Polaris 11 “Baffin” and Polaris 10 “Ellesmere”. The first is an energy-efficient story that will draw below 50 W and be aimed at mainly thin gaming computers. The other is believed to offer performance in class with the Geforce GTX 980 Ti and Radeon R9 Fury X, but at a significantly lower price of around 300 dollars or 3,000 kronor.

Assuming previous information is correct, this means that the Polaris 10 does not have what it takes to counter Nvidia’s upcoming duo, both of which will perform better than today’s flagship Geforce GTX Titan X. However, the circuit is believed to be just over 30 percent smaller than the GP104 used in the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, which in any case in theory gives AMD the opportunity to compete with lower prices.