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Pemalite said:

JEMC said:

WARNING RUMOR

Wccftech has posted an article where they claim that AMD is already launching products made with an improved 14nm process that, with other improvements, give them 50% better Perf/Watt... and of course they're launching them first in the embedded market.

http://wccftech.com/amd-polaris-revisions-performance-per-watt/

This significant improvement in power efficiency has been attributed to an improvement to the 14nm metal mask layers of both Polaris GPUs by AMD in combination with a more refined binning process. The new revision of Polaris 10 that’s will go into the embedded market will bring down the typical board power from 150W as is found in the RX 480 to less than 95W. The updated revision of Polaris 11 will not only bring down the power from 75W to less than 50W but it will also improve clock speeds and bring up the compute throughput to 2.5 TFLOPS from 2.15.

The new revisions will be available immediately to the embedded market under the E9550 and E9260 product names for Polaris 10 and 11 respectively. The updated revisions are believed to be coming to the mobile market in the form of mobility Radeon RX 400 series graphics cards in the coming months. It’s not clear yet whether AMD will also introduce the new revision to the desktop market. However, in the mobile market where power efficiency rules supreme this could prove to be a pivotal change for the company’s competitiveness in notebooks.

 

Ok, I get that better efficiency is important for mobile GPUs, but surely a RX 485 that's 5-10% faster than a regular 480 using the same power or less, and capable of delivering the same performance as Nvidia's 1060 in DX11 games while being a lot faster than that card in Vulkan and DX12 games, would be something that many gamers would be interested in, right?

This is big news. And it could help make AMD a little more competitive with nVidia if AMD plays it's cards (Pun Intended) right.

Could be good news for Vega, let's hope it's a Titan killer. ;)

JEMC said:

Pemalite said:

January this year was when the 2nd generation LPP process was announced. February 2015 was when the 1st generation process was announced.

Global foundries being a partner with Samsung has been adopting them pretty quickly all things considered.

AMD has already stated that Polaris is using the 2nd Generation LPP process though and we knew about the 2nd gen LPP process as early as middle of 2015 thanks to Global Foundries looking for job calls.

Still. It doesn't tell is what the 3rd generation process is being compared against though.

Given that Polaris didn't launch until late June, and that supply wasn't very good, I hope AMD/GF used the second gen. But that makes it hard to believe that they've been able to improve it another 50%.

In any case, we'll see soon-ish. I just hope they show and launch it before my card finally gives up!

Great news if the rumour is true, but it looks like I'll have to wait some months more if I want to be sure to have improved chips for the desktop too. If, as you suggested, they'll base the improved 4x5 models on the refined 14nm process, though, choice will be a lot easier, not to mention that this way they won't risk pissing off some buyers of GPUs with the same name, but based on different refinements of the process depending on production date.
Also, AMD will better use from the start the new refinement for the Zen+Polaris APUs it should launch in 2017, they'd be a perfect choice for entry-level gaming PCs too.