{"id":80375,"date":"2015-08-21T14:30:56","date_gmt":"2015-08-21T12:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=80375"},"modified":"2015-08-21T14:31:35","modified_gmt":"2015-08-21T12:31:35","slug":"greenland-baffin-and-ellesmere-amds-newest-gpus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/hardware\/80375-greenland-baffin-and-ellesmere-amds-newest-gpus","title":{"rendered":"Greenland, Baffin and Ellesmere: AMD’s newest GPUs"},"content":{"rendered":"

NVIDIA isn\u2019t the only one working on a new GPU microarchitecture \u2013 we\u2019re talking Pascal<\/a> here. AMD are concocting a few new GPUs of their own.<\/p>\n

In fact, AMD are so excited about their upcoming range of GPU families that they\u2019re pinning a lot of their profit margins on them, hoping to make up some ground against NVIDIA.<\/p>\n

To do so, they\u2019ll be introducing the Arctic Islands GPU family in 2016, a new, incredibly efficient and really quite different microarchitecture than compared to GCN<\/a> \u2013 so much so that it\u2019s being called \u201cpost-GCN\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"AMD<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

GCN was introduced in 2011, so it\u2019s definitely in need of some big changes. Good as it is, NVIDIA\u2019s microarchitecture provides a lot more in the gaming sphere, and AMD\u2019s Fury architecture only really competes thanks to a ludicrous number of stream processors.<\/p>\n

The largest contributing factor to the evolution of AMD\u2019s microarchitecture is the use of FinFET Process Technology<\/a>, which will allow AMD to finally move from 28nmm fabrication to either TSMC\u2019s 16nm or GlobalFoundries\u2019 14nm fabrication, allowing for significantly more processing punch to be packed onto around the same chunk of silicon.<\/p>\n

That all takes place next year, when AMD unveils GCN 1.4 to the world, a microarchitecture that is supposedly twice as energy efficient, pack a heck of a lot more punch and will be designed with augmented and virtual reality applications in mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are tweaking the GCN to make it even more energy efficient. We are going to drive optimizations in workloads where we already excel with GCN, such as machine learning and a number of artificial intelligence applications. There is more innovation to come,<\/em>\u201d said chief technology officer at AMD, Mark Papermaster.<\/p>\n

\"AMD<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So what exactly can we expect from Greenland, Baffin and Ellesmere?<\/p>\n

Like with NVIDIA\u2019s Pascal, Greenland will make use of HBM2<\/a> memory, allowing for extremely high bandwidths, up to as much as 1TB\/s, and much more capacity than could be done with HBM1<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And given that the considerably smaller 14nm\/16nm FinFET processes allow for up to 90% more transistor density than when compared to 28nm, Greenland GPUs will likely have similar transistor count to that of Pascal (17 billion transistors) \u2013 between 15 and 18 billion transistors.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an almost certainty then that Greenland is AMD\u2019s next flagship GPU, replacing Fiji<\/a>. Perhaps AMD will stick with the updated naming scheme and we\u2019ll see Greenland powering Fury 2s.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, not a lot is known about Baffin and Ellesmere, but sources have suggested to KitGuru<\/a> that they are entirely new GPUs \u2013 meaning no more recycling.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t wait to see Pascal and Greenland duke it out. How about you?<\/p>\n

\n

Source: KitGuru<\/a><\/strong><\/h4>\n

Here’s what’s happening in the NVIDIA camp<\/strong><\/h3>\n

NVIDIA launches GeForce GTX 950<\/a><\/p>\n

NVIDIA announces GTX 990M: to be more powerful than GTX 980M SLI<\/a><\/p>\n

NVIDIA Pascal cards sport 17 billion transistors and 32GB of HBM2 VRAM<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greenland and Pascal enter a room, only one comes out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":80377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1051,15475,15473,15471,47,1771,15469,1085,14879,1969,15477,1486],"class_list":["post-80375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hardware","tag-amd","tag-arctic-islands","tag-baffin","tag-ellesmere","tag-gpu","tag-graphics-cards","tag-greenland","tag-hardware-2","tag-hbm2","tag-news-2","tag-post-gcn","tag-radeon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}