AMD Polaris refresh to have 50 percent better performance/Watt?

One idea that's been floating around since the weeks before the launch of AMD's Polaris lineup is that these parts were not what AMD intended them to be. They were more power hungry than they should have been and weren't able to hit the desired performance levels, which forced AMD to launch them as a sort of a mainstream lineup with low pricing.

Now the word on the street is that AMD is preparing a Polaris refresh that will offer much higher performance per Watt. WCCF Tech claims enhancements in the metal mask layers of GlobalFoundries' 14nm process, as well as a more refined binning process and probably some other tweaks will enable AMD to launch new Polaris parts with 50 percent higher performance per Watt.

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.

According to the site, these revisions will be available immediately to the embedded market in the form of the E9950 (Polaris 10) and E9260 (Polaris 11). Laptop variants are expected to follow in the coming months but it's uncertain if these parts will make it to the desktop market.

It's definitely plausible, earlier this year AMD hinted there may be a Polaris refresh when it laid out its new desktop graphics card naming scheme. If accurate, this could mean we'll get Radeon RX 485, RX 475 and RX 465 variants of the current Polaris 10 and 11 video cards. These could be part of AMD's graphics lineup alongside the upcoming high-end Vega10 and Vega11 GPUs.