AMD Rumored To Be Soon Launching A 12nm Polaris Refresh

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Rumored To Be Soon Launching A 12nm Polaris Refresh

The latest rumors in the Radeon space is that AMD is in the final stages of preparing to release its third iteration of Polaris GPUs... We could be seeing a Radeon RX 670 and RX 680 very soon...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-12nm-Polaris-Soon

[Venemo]

At least it's better than nothing, I guess? Though 10% improvement is not something to look forward to.
It's a bit sad to see they are basically unable to compete with NVidia.

[discordian]

Another 12nm GPU? Hmm, seems like their 7nm Navis are still several months away.

btw.: I considered buying a cheap Graphics card that can drive 3 displays, AMD has nothing below 200€ while I can get a Nvidia one for 50€. AMD, fix your lineup please.

[Adriannho]

This is so depressive. Nvidia is eating them alive.

[DanL]

btw.: I considered buying a cheap Graphics card that can drive 3 displays, AMD has nothing below 200€

But, but, but, you need a "workstation" card for that...

[Guest]

I for one could use a 10% performance bump to my RX580. That would eliminate the unpleasant drops below 60 FPS that I have sometimes.

[ms178]

I guess we now see the fruits of all of that underinvestment from years ago. I understand that they had to prioritize their ressources and focused on 7nm at TSMC on the cost of this dry season with no really new graphics products. I remember a slide from AMD's Mark Papermaster last year where 12 nm GPUs were originially on their roadmap for this year. But maybe there were some capacity issues at GloFo, the gains were considered not to be worth it or they hoped for an earlier readiness of 7nm or something else. Then they changed their mind again for Polaris to compete at the entry-performance level. A consumer Vega in 12nm would have been nice if they could ship it in more volume and better pricing, but HBM2 is still way too costly. I hope Navi is worth the wait, they surely increase market expactations by this long wait.

[Jabberwocky]

Another 12nm GPU? Hmm, seems like their 7nm Navis are still several months away.

btw.: I considered buying a cheap Graphics card that can drive 3 displays, AMD has nothing below 200€ while I can get a Nvidia one for 50€. AMD, fix your lineup please.

I had the same problem, initially got a Geforce 710 but had too many issues with it under Linux, so I have it away. I got a Geforce 1030* which had more driver issues than the 710. A while later I got furious and bought a radeon rx 560 that had a really good special (cheaper than rx 550 at the time, but still much more expensive than low-end geforce cards).

In South Africa the Asus rx 550 4GB is going for $116,95 USD from a supplier with low markup, on Amazon it's $210.00 USD. That's a first for me, usually the hardware this side is much more expensive.

*The Geforce 1030 only supported 2 displays, I could have lived with 2 displays if the drivers worked.

[Strunkenbold]

That 10% increase is just something noteworthy if efficiency is increasing.
Because everyone could get 10% perf increase today, just by overclocking. The only big problem is that energy consumption would be even higher then.

[L_A_G]

My understanding is that the 12nm process (previously used in this year's Ryzen refresh) is an evolution of the 14nm process licensed from Samsung where they've sorted out some issues caused by the process being originally created specifically for mobile devices. In practice this meant that particularly the early iterations of this process were set up for maximum efficiency at relatively low clocks, thus dampening clocking potential and efficiency at higher clock frequencies. In other words this is not going to be anything revolutionary, but it should be a decent bump-up without hardware vendors needing to do anything beyond very minor changes to pre-existing products.

Re-tooling for an improved version of a process is obviously cheaper and faster than re-tooling for a brand new process like they're doing with Vega 20, but it's still a pretty expensive proposition. However it is probably necessary as the low-mid range really the only part of the gaming graphics market where AMD has any significant market share anymore and if Nvidia releases the lower end of the Turing family before the end of the year, AMD is going to be a wee bit screwed as Navi is rumored not be ready for launch until the very end of Q1.