AMD to 14 nanometers with Radeon family “Arctic Islands”

After a long wait, the graphics card market is blowing up. After a long period of silence, AMD will soon be ready to confront Nvidia Maxwell with the graphics family Pirate Islands and the Radeon 300 series, which is based on the 28-nanometer technology that both graphics giants have had to rely on since the beginning of 2012.

AMD Graphics Core Next

Next year, it’s time for another new generation of graphics cards, and from AMD’s side, SweClockers has previously been able to reveal that it is a code name Arctic Islands. This most likely also means a new leap in manufacturing technology, something that will enable more transistors in a smaller area at the same time as power consumption decreases.

While many saw 20 nanometers as the natural step from 28 nanometers, that technology has proven to be unsuitable for large and power-hungry graphics circuits. Instead, AMD is said to go straight to 14 nanometers with 3D transistors (Finfet) with the future Arctic Islands family.

In addition to being able to push in significantly more transistors on the same surface as today or to make a correspondingly smaller circuit, the transition to 14 nanometers would also mean that production is managed by Samsung or Globalfoundries. This conclusion is drawn based on the fact that TSMC’s corresponding technology is called 16 nanometers.

According to Expreview, the flagship will be the graphics processor Greenland, which in addition to new manufacturing technology uses second-generation HBM memory. This is expected to provide a memory bandwidth exceeding 1,000 GB / s or 1 TB / s, up from 320 GB / s for today’s Radeon R9 290X or expected 640 GB / s for the upcoming Radeon R9 390X using the first generation HBM.

Assuming that AMD sticks to its current name scheme, Arctic Islands will be part of the Radeon 400 series, which arrives sometime in 2016.

Source: Expreview.