CES: AMD Announces New Graphics Card Polaris with 14nm FinFET fabrication

The new graphics architecture AMD Polaris supports HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3. It also aims to offer lower power consumption and enabling thinner and lighter notebooks.From mid-year, the company wants to bring the chips on the market.

With Polaris AMD has on the CES presented in Las Vegas a new graphics architecture. It consists in the production of available from mid-2016 chips on the 14-nanometer FinFET process. The GPUs will support, inter alia, HDR monitors and allow the encoding and decoding of 4K videos in H.265 format at 60 frames per second.

AMD Logo (Picture: AMD)

When Polaris is the fourth generation of AMD's GPU architecture Graphics Core Next (CGN). The display engine now also provides support for HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3.

"Our new Polaris architecture shows significant advances in performance, energy efficiency and functionality" is Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD, in a press release quoted. "2016 will be a very interesting year for Radeon fans."

To achieve this performance, nearly all of the components have been revised, including command and geometry processor Level 2 cache, multimedia cores, memory controller and display engine. The transition from 28-nanometer process to structure widths of 14 nanometers will also reduce energy consumption significantly.

For Polaris-based graphics cards AMD calls using the example of the computer game "Star Wars: Battlefront" According to a consumption of 85 watts, compared to 140 watts a Nvidia graphics card with 28 nanometer-sized structures. Due to the lower energy consumption, the chips will also allow the development of "thin and light" notebooks with the graphics performance of a game console.

In the third quarter AMD had a significant decline in sales and a loss of $ 197 million reported. The division for PCs and GPUs lost due to low demand for PCs 46 percent of their revenue a. In the current financial year announced in October to Downsizing our balance sheet. The new GPU generation is, however, until the second half of the year can contribute to the desired turnaround - currently AMD provides only pattern to original equipment manufacturers of.