AMD's upcoming Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 graphics chips won't be powering high-end graphics cards, according to recent comments by AMD. In its latest financial report, the company noted that Polaris 11 would target "the notebook market," while Polaris 10 would target "the mainstream desktop and high-end gaming notebook segment."
In an interview with Ars, AMD's Roy Taylor also confirmed that Polaris would target mainstream users, particularly those interested in creating a VR-ready system.
"The reason Polaris is a big deal, is because I believe we will be able to grow that TAM [total addressable market] significantly," said Taylor. "I don't think Nvidia is going to do anything to increase the TAM, because according to everything we've seen around Pascal, it's a high-end part. I don't know what the price is gonna be, but let's say it's as low as £500/$600 and as high as £800/$1000. That price range is not going to expand the TAM for VR. We're going on the record right now to say Polaris will expand the TAM. Full stop."
While those after a successor to the likes of high-end graphics cards like the Fury and Fury X may be disappointed, that Polaris is a mainstream part doesn't necessarily mean it's underpowered. The minimum specs for a VR system call for an Nvidia GTX 970 or an AMD Radeon 290 (or its near-identical replacement the 390), both of which currently retail for around £250.
"If you look at the total install base of a Radeon 290, or a GTX 970, or above, it's 7.5 million units. But the issue is that if a publisher wants to sell a £40/$50 game, that's not a big enough market to justify that yet. We've got to prime the pumps, which means somebody has got to start writing cheques to big games publishers. Or we've got to increase the install TAM."
AMD's recent statements are seemingly contrary to those made by its graphics head, Raja Koduri, in January of this year. In an interview with VentureBeat, Koduri explained that one of the Polaris GPUs was a larger, high-performance GPU designed to take back the premium graphics card market currently dominated by rival Nvidia. It now appears that he was simply referring to bringing high-performance down to a more reasonable price point.
"When we set out to design this GPU, we set a completely different goal than for the usual way the PC road maps go," explained Koduri at the time. "Those are driven by 'the benchmark score this year is X. Next year we need to target 20 percent better at this cost and this power.' We decided to do something exciting with this GPU. Let's spike it so we can accomplish something we hadn't accomplished before."
Full details on AMD's Polaris graphics cards are expected at Computex at the end of May, while Nvidia is expected to reveal details on its Pascal graphics architecture around the same time. Both of the upcoming products have been through the rumour mill multiple times, with some suggesting that Polaris will continue to use HBM1—thus limiting the cards to 4GB of memory—while others suggest that they'll simply use plain old GDDR5.
Meanwhile, Nvidia unveiled its first Pascal graphics card, the monstrous Tesla P100, which is designed for data centres. While the P100 features HBM2 memory—with a crazy-wide 4096-bit bus—rumours suggest the consumer cards will use GDDR5X, an improved version of GDDR5 intended to compete with HBM. There have even been a few shots of the PCB and shroud for the Pascal cards, but take those with a very large grain of salt.
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