AMD’s next generation “Arctic Islands” family of FinFET GPUs has been subject to a number of leaks this year. One of which indicated that the family contains three new GPUs, code named Greenland, Ellesmere and Baffin. Today we’re not only confirming that this is information is in fact accurate but that both Ellesmere and Baffin have in fact taped out and are awaiting commencement of FinFET process volume production to kick off next year.
AMD has also managed to secure a major OEM design win with both “Ellesmere” and “Baffin” GPUs a source with knowledge of AMD’s roadmap confirmed to WCCFTech. Greenland will be AMD’s next generation flagship GPU, while Ellesmere and Baffin will address the performance and mainstream segments of the market. The Arctic Islands family will debut with the three aforementioned GPUs in a variety of SKUs which will address the entire discrete GPU market top to bottom. We’ve seen this three GPU strategy before with AMD’s first 28nm GPUs code named “Southern Islands” in the form of the HD 7900 series, HD 7800 series and HD 7700 series.
AMD Arctic Islands Family Entering Production Next Year
Yesterday we detailed AMD’s plans to update the entire graphics line-up over “the coming quarters” with a new set of products that have “2X the performance per watt” of AMD’s current GPUs.
Lisa Su – Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. – President, CEO – Q3 2015 Earnings TeleconferenceI think it’s also fair to say that the graphics portfolio is quite broad, and so you will see us updating the entire portfolio over the coming quarters,
Lisa Su – Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. – President, CEO – Q3 2015 Earnings Teleconference
We are also focused on delivering our next-generation GPUs in 2016 designed to improve performance per watt by 2X compared to our current offerings, based on design architectural enhancements, as well as advanced FinFET process technology.
Despite the existence of three+ different iterations of GCN namely GCN 1.0 ( HD 7000 series ) , GCN 1.1 ( R9 290 series) , GCN 1.2 ( R9 285 and 380) and Fiji ( R9 Fury X, R9 Fury and R9 Nano) which is based on an updated GCN 1.2 design; according to AMD’s Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster there have only been two generations of GCN so far. With the next major iteration – 3rd generation – coming next year in the form of the “Arctic Islands” family of graphics chips.
Arctic Islands will feature three major improvements over AMD’s current current R 300 series and Fury series line-up. These include second generation HBM, next generation GCN architecture as well as a more advanced 14/16nm FinFET manufacturing process. The three of which will define the performance and power efficiency characteristics of the Arctic Islands family.
It was confirmed back in August that AMD is in fact one of TSMC’s clients for the 16nm node. That, in addition to historical precedent and a number of reports indicate that AMD will indeed manufacture its next generation GPUs using TSMC’s 16nm process. TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process node offers double the transistor density of current 28nm technology as well as faster switching speeds – which translate to higher clock speeds – and finally significantly lower power consumption per transistor. So we’re looking at larger graphics engines than AMD’s current line-up with faster clock speeds and significantly better power efficiency.
TSMC.com
TSMC’s 16FF+ (FinFET Plus) technology can provide above 65 percent higher speed, around 2 times the density, or 70 percent less power than its 28HPM technology. Comparing with 20SoC technology, 16FF+ provides extra 40% higher speed and 60% power saving. By leveraging the experience of 20SoC technology, TSMC 16FF+ shares the same metal backend process in order to quickly improve yield and demonstrate process maturity for time-to-market value.
It will be interesting to see how things shape up next year with Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs which will also be produced on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process and feature second generation High Bandwidth Memory. When exactly Pascal and Arctic Islands GPUs will be released and how much they’re going to cost will depend almost entirely on 16nm production yields and volumes. But so far this is shaping up to be one of the biggest performance and power efficiency boosts we’re going to see from a new generation of graphics cards in a long while.
| WCCFTech | Year | Process | Flagship GPU | Product | Memory | Bandwidth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southern Islands | 2012 | 28nm | Tahiti | HD 7970 | 3GB GDDR5 | 264GB/s |
| Volcanic Islands | 2013 | 28nm | Hawaii | R9 290X | 4GB GDDR5 | 320GB/s |
| Pirate/Caribbean Islands | 2015 | 28nm | Fiji | R9 Fury X | 4GB HBM1 | 512GB/s |
| Arctic Islands | 2016 | 14/16nm FinFET | Greenland | ? | ?GB HBM2 | 1TB/s |
No comments:
Post a Comment