Mobile Polaris Discussion

You know what is funny? That we built over 100 pages-long topic for a single mobile Polaris GPU which you can find in a limited edition notebook, non-MXM... China only.
I think at some point we all were delusional here.

 

And it's a RX460...

 

Unless I missed something... the only thing I can see about mobile Polaris is this:
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/2...d-polaris-gpus-touchid-and-oled-function-keys

So, nothing on Windows laptops end as of yet

 

Probably AMD's focus is the Mac refresh as you said.. That's the only thing that will keep their mobile GPU's relevant!

 

i'm guessing at this point AMD thinks, MBP is its halo polaris implementation.come to think of the timelines Late 2016, it might even be a vega inside MBP. That would be killer

 

So... AMD just gave up? Looking on XoticPC for example, I see zero Polaris machines. Would be nice to see what they could offer since the prices of 1080 machines are astronomical. Without competition, seems to me NVidia prices have nothing to hold them back, fix whatever price they want.

GTX 980M I bought for $1800. New Sager flagship is $3000 at minimum? That's a $1200 increase.

 

Hm, you can't compare the 980M to the 1080. Compare 980 (without M) with 1080 Notebooks. Those were expensive, too. Just saying...

 

I think the 980 notebooks used to add up to around 2800-3000.. So not much difference...

You have to compare the 980 desktop laptop prices as the 980M was mobile and over 2 years old now... So Kommando, I agree with your logic

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http://arrayfire.com/explaining-fp64-performance-on-gpus/

amd's seems to be the better choice if ones into compute, although cuda right now seems to be the defacto standard in deep learning that even xeon phi's having hard time catching up.

too bad nvidia consumer card is gimped

 

I normally love troll AMD, but we do need AMD to provide some competition. NVidia has no reason to provide us performance at a reasonable cost.

 

Not going to happen.

Too little too late. AMD are gone from mobility scene and many of us can no longer afford a gaming laptop now that nvidia have taken over.

980 mobility was a niche and 980M mainstream. Now nvidia have turned the mainstream into niche and kept the niche price.

Strange how mxm is capable of delivering 195W of power yet both 1060 (80w) and 1070 (130) feature an extra power connector.

Is it needed? No
Is the strange new size needed? No
Are the odd mxm board shapes needed? No
Does nvidia need to drop lvds completely? No

Is nvidia greedy and after a monopoly in the pc market? YES

Are we the consumer shafted? YES

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Hear Hear!! Never thought I would hear you say this!!

 

The 980m slot was taken by the 1070, is it really $3000 for a 1070 version of what you ordered as a 980m configuration?

 

Hmm... I was under the impression that the 980m slot was taken by mobile 1060 (which does offer superior performance at a similar cost).
The mobile 1070 is far more expensive (about £300 more here in UK it would seem - at least on PC Specialist)... and lets not even delve into the mobile 1080.

I was hoping to get myself a new laptop with a high end Polaris mobile gpu inside, but this is getting ridiculous.
If AMD was completely squeezed out of the mobile sector, then waiting for Polaris is a no go (they mentioned that laptops with Polaris 11 and 10 will be available in notebooks before back to school season - I think we're around that time frame, unless they meant it for MacBooks only?).

At this rate, I will probably end up getting myself a laptop with a mobile 1060.

As for AMD performance.... it actually delivers more than enough performance for games and far superior performance on compute (though I agree that unfortunately, a lot of software went with CUDA instead).

 

Just so you know, 970M/980M and 1060/1070 are cheaper than 770M/780M, 670MX/680M, 570M/580M, etc.

 

Cheaper to make or buy

 

Really? I don't buy that its cheaper lol!!

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It's not up to you to "buy that it is cheaper" or not. It is. 780M, 680M, etc were $860. 980M was $720. Similar pricing happened for 970M and 770M/670MX/etc.

 

It looks so... Since they don't have any competition against GTX 1000 series... We can forget about Notebook GPU's.

 

well...not quite yet. @Prema mentioned an AMD mxm option coming our way soon(ish) in standard 3.0b flavour. he said it wouldnt be an option for folks looking to get 1080 performance, but for guys with maxwell machines it should be a viable upgrade option. so lets wait and see!

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How can this be true, when the 1070 laptops cost exactly what the 980M laptops did, at launch?

Seems like the truth doesn't fit your narrative.

 

Please do share more! Where was this commented on? I guess a 1060M contender?

 

In the Pascal MXM thread.

 

I'm not convinced yet that Polaris 10 will be an upgrade Option to existing Maxwell rigs. What we know so far is that "their flagship" RX 480m would be roughly on par with 970m, 980m at best.

So as per my understanding it would surely make a nice upgrade Option for Fermi-/Kepler-based rigs.

 

who knows, maybe prema was talking about vega in mxm

 

There is a unannounced rx 490m too

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Hmm lost is any chance of upgrading. Modular card 980M was. 1070 isn't. You want to pay 980M price for the trash throwaway crap the 1070 is then go ahead.

One thing is CERTAIN you will never be able to upgrade it. Clevo/MSI the lot of them will not let you. Each year the boards will change shape.

 

AMD Takes Graphics Share From Nvidia For The Fourth Consecutive Quarter
http://wccftech.com/amd-takes-graphics-share-nvidia-fourth-consecutive-quarter/

 

Some sign of competition within the duopoly is good, but is it just me or is the gap between the two companies in both the discrete and desktop markets still huge?

 

People wondered why Nvidia didn't care about AMD winning the PS4 and X1 contracts. These numbers really put why into perspective.

 

AMD really need to push past 40% consistently to have any chance at pressuring Nvidia.

 

The RX480 has been behind the push, now they just need an high end card to turn some screws on Nvidia..

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I hope that we'll see Vega by the year's end, but that's really doubtful to be honest. Early next year is the better bet.

I hoped that we'll see Polaris 10 on steroids i.e. RX 490 with 2560 SPs*. After all, the name is reserved and they have differentiated the HBM line's naming, it seems logical that it would be another Polaris. There's still time though, so that Polaris 10 2560 SP RX 490 might still happen (in a couple of months, or no latter than the year's end) in order to fill the gap while Vega is getting ready. That should also serve as a pointer of when to expect Vega (at least 3 months from the RX 490 release). That's my guess. Let's see how things would play-out.

*If you wonder from where I got this number - Microsoft's Scorpio is supposed to have such GPU.

EDIT: It could always be a dual-chip GPU, maybe that's why they tried to put it against a 1080 on the presentation.

That's why they stroke a deal with Nintendo recently, right? The truth is, Tegra wasn't good enough especially when you consider the next year's upgrade (Zen + Polaris). What Tegra would've offered for the upgrade? I don't think that ARM is up to match Zen.

 

I thought RX480 was already a fully fledged Polaris 10 core?!

 

There were rumors prior the release about 2560 SP chip, and now the Scorpio is rumored to have it too (at least by design, since in APUs both the GPU and the CPU are made together).

 

Derailing the mobile side a bit, I'm thinking about replacing my desktop innards with AMD with Zen/Vega 10. I'm not expecting it to beat an Intel i7/1080GTX, but as long as it's near or in the same ballpark I'm willing to give it a chance. I was real interested in the RX480, but once I saw the score it didn't make sense to replace my 970 at the moment.

 

Rumor is that the NX will be an extension of the Wii U where you had a dedicated console and a portable controller with its own screen that let you use it around the house. Tegra would be plenty if it's going to power such a device and basically take over the 3DS spot as well. The concept being that when you're at home you can play NX games using the controller but on the go, you could use game streaming or even 3DS games. The 3DS is the only success Nintendo has right now, it would make sense for them to capitalize on that by integrating their next generation console with their next generation 3DS which would explain the conflicting rumors of the NX using both Tegra and Polaris. It would be a natural extension from the direction of the Wii U but a lot more successful if they just turned the NX into a 2-in-1. I'd definitely buy one.

 

And that was the point - Zen and Polaris - combined and separately wont be able to come that low in order to fit a hybrid device (Zen would start a bit higher than where Jaguar's top offers were), just like Tegra is unable to go up if needed, and with 4K and VR, it is obviously needed. So again, it's not because they didn't wanted, it's because they couldn't fit the bill. Also, do you think that Nintendo developers would be happy about the switch? Hopefully the new console would be worth the hassle to code against yet another hardware. So this is also part of the reason to get a hardware that scales when needed, especially when it was created on the verge of 4K, VR, HDR and what not.

 

So where is mobile Polaris, anyway? Nvidia has released Pascal, Intel has released Kaby Lake (or at least announced a release date for the parts that it did not release), but I don't see anything concrete from AMD except for the desktop parts.

 

Is it possible the Scorpio has a cut-down Vega chip instead? Or is it explicitly stated it will be using Polaris?
Also, to add something to the mobile side, the only PC brands that used r9 m300 series were Lenovo and Alienware (Dell and HP if you want to include the business line). Alienware is soon to release their new 13, 15, and 17" laptops, so it may be possible one of those has an AMD GPU option.

 

All just guesses, but based on stated 6 TFLOPS for Scorpio and 5.8 TFLOPS for RX 480, it looks more like just Polaris.

Maybe even some custom chip smaller than RX 480, as for consoles they tend to count TFLOPS from both GPU +CPU, and it would be APU there.

 

No it's the GPU only, I've red it on a few places.

@Game7a1 - It's stated as 6 TFLOPS and the general guess is that it's pumped-up Polaris (since RX 480 is really close), but it might be a cut-down Vega as well. Not very likely though, because Fury is 7.2 TFLOPS, while the Fury X is 8.6 TFLOPS. Don't know how Vega would perform or scale, but at 6 TFLOPS, it must be severely cut-down.

I hope we'll see some movement as well. Especially in the Precisions, that's my last hope for Polaris MXM-B.

It's up to the OEMs as well. There's an HP Omen 15 with RX 460, but it is China only.

 

No I don't think that Vega will be released before early 2017.
I think AMD themselves confirmed as much recently.
And while there have been rumors about AMD having more beefed up version of Polaris, I think AMD stated that 480 is the full Polaris gpu.

There have been talks of the 490 being a dual Polaris 10 essentially, but we have 0 concrete data about this.
Apart from that, we will have to wait and see.

And the only think I've discovered thus far about mobile Polaris relates only to Apple using it (or, using Polaris 11) in it's refresh of MBP's, iMac's, etc.
Nothing on OEM parts yet.

I actually contacted customer service at pcspecialist.co.uk to ask them if they plan to have Polaris gpu's on offer in their laptops... they said they have 0 plans of having AMD discrete solutions on offer for their laptops (they do offer the desktop 480 for custom desktop builds).

I'm very disappointed by this (considering they offered AMD alongside Nvidia during 7970 days), but I cannot say I'm surprised.

I am also very put off by Nvidia and their lack of performance and supports in DX12, not to mention Vulkan.
Things are going FORWARD, not backward... this is why I'd prefer AMD in my system, because it could take advantage of the new coding in increasing amounts and simultaneously result in better performance (for essentially free), while Nvidia is what? Stuck on DX11 and 'capitalizing' in the short term on that.

It's really ridiculous to be honest.

 

New Alienware 15 and 17 come with an AMD RX GPU ( RX 470 for 17).

 

I don't particularly like DELL.
They tend to be overpriced for what they offer (very similar to Apple), plus the design of that system is quite unappealing (though that could be overlooked in favor of functionality and how easy it is to access the internal components for dust cleaning and repasting [seeing how I'm not particularly hung up on looks] - though, seeing how most OEMS make it increasingly difficult to access internal components for physical maintenance short of full blown dis-assembly, I don't know whether I'd opt for that or for a system that just offers easy access to the components by simply unscrewing the lower bit covering the CPU, RAM, HDD and GPU - seeing I can easily do so on my Acer).

From a design point of view... the Octane III as offered by PC Specialist looks easier on the eye vs the Alienware (At least it does to me, though in some respects they are alike) - no too many unnecessary flashy bits:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Octane+III+laptop&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwji_NqYoPDOAhXrB8AKHSH_AP4Q_AUICSgC&biw=1280&bih=939#imgrc=WdjvfjYEeqH7AM:

Still, PCSPECIALIST won't offer AMD option for mobile.

Plus, is that Alienware 17 with AMD only for US, or will that be applicable to UK too?


EDIT:
From what I can tell, the RX 470 on the mobile side will be a desktop part in mobile. That would be great for occasional FHD gaming for example (Especially since AMD's Wattman works with all Polaris cards and will mean undervolting might/should be doable).

 

I was going to post this earlier, but was busy. That's nice, but they can cram a 1080 (1060 and 1070 as well) and not an RX 480? It's still early to talk about the 1080's implementation, but I would guess that it wont be close to say Clevo, or msi GT73VR with 1080 (you'll excuse me, but have you seen in what kind of machines a 1080 goes into? (THICK ones)). A wild guess - an RX 480 would've cut deeper into the nGREEDIA sales than the RX 470, since the price/performance would've favored the RX 480. Do note I'm not saying that it would completely obliterate the 1060, or even the 1070, but it had far better chances than an RX 470. Also I'm not very sure about RX 470's VR capabilities, since RX 480 is on the line. Once again that's one of these "an-(average-)AMD-option-enjoy" implementations. Starting to wonder if that's the reason they finally included the W7170m, because it's no match to the M5000M. There goes any hope for a good AMD powered product. Yeah, I wont hold my breath on Precisions either. Desktop it is and I'll do my best to make my current machine meet my on-the-go needs.

 

One thing I'm thinking is that the AMD GPU ins the entry GPU, so there'll be an AMD GPU in all of Alienware's new laptops, so even the new 13 will get one (be it an RX 460 or RX 470, I don't know). Here are the specs for the RX 470 for laptop.
It may not rule out an RX 480 mobile from happening, though.

 

I don't know, I saw listed all the nGREEDIA options and only RX 470 on AMD's side, not to mention that some sites completely missed to mention the AMD option. Also I skimmed though the document and I didn't saw a VR mention. So should that mean that only nGREEDIA's would get that VR-Ready badge? I myself don't care, but a lot of people do and that's a selling point to them.

 

Will the RX 470 be cheap enough compared to a GTX1060 though?

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Something interesting about the RX 470 Mobile is that it has 8 GB of VRAM as opposed to 4 GB. I'm guessing this is to compete with Nvidia's high VRAM mobile offerings (they did the same with the R9 m395x, where it had a 4 GB and 8 GB VRAM option, so the R9 380 and R9 380X could have had 8 GB of VRAM, but it wouldn't have been that useful).