Mobile Polaris Discussion

Lets see what this mobile rx 470 can do first. Then judge after! D2 although your comments are valid they could still be classed as speculation at this point.

Rx470 mobile might behave very differently than vanilla rx480. Amd have had a chance to tweak and improve the product.

Lets be positive and wait and see!

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I just hope reviewers get it closer to its launch. I don't want to see a repeat of the Alienware 15 + R9 m295x.

 

Well, I doubt they meant rx 480, because it should not take so long and 480 is rather power hungry, really hard to fit it in a laptop.

Gaming laptops market is constantly growing (20-30%/year) and though it constitutes only 3-4% of total laptop/convertibles market, there are still like 20M gaming laptops sold every year (I think I saw it in some ngreedia slides), so AMD shouldn't neglect it so much, but what it should do is go and release mobile VEGA already! That is what I hope AMD guy meant in the comments section

 

Vega would be ideal, but I don't know how soon that will be, I think I saw roadmap slides for 2017, and that quote from the Alienware Rep talked about more awesome stuff this year...he was vague, but I wonder what will come.

 

It's as much speculation as my calls about Pascal were. It's based on existing information. It's still "speculation", certainly, but it's not exactly random guessing. The KEY difference between everybody being "positive" here about what mobile Polaris can do and me, is that everybody who is basing it on previous cards (Tonga, Pitcairn) fails to understand that both Tonga and Pitcairn held their clocks/boost properly without crossing their given TDP limits. This is NOT true of Polaris, because AMD wanted them to be "budget" cards, which means they expect "budget" PSUs, which means 8-pin connector requirements are not that common.

What I'm saying is, you can undervolt Polaris and its memory certainly and shove it on mobile, but if you expect higher boosting performance on the desktop cards (which is what gives them their competition status to the 1060 etc, and by extension the 980M that the mobile RX 470 might compete with), they aren't going to be able to get far by undervolting, since the cards are already TDP throttled on desktop. Undervolting them will keep the basic TDP, but give them more performance. If they cut drawn TDP from the cards, then performance will drop. See where the problem will come in?

The RX 470 is 120W down from the "150W" of the RX 480, yes. That's a 20% drop in TDP, but only a 12% drop in core count. How is this achieved? The base clocks of the RX 480 is 1120MHz, and the base clocks of the RX 470 is only 926MHz. Both boost over 1200MHz. Since boost is not a "guarantee" (to anyone except us, of course), if the card drops from 1200MHz to 950MHz, it's still "working as intended", but drawing quite a bit less power. That coupled with the drop of the number of cores equates to the larger TDP drop of 20%. But again, if you drop the voltage a lot, it might suddenly begin holding proper performance, but its actual TDP would be higher. In actuality, the RX 480 should be a ~180W card and the RX 470 should be a ~150W card. This is where problems are coming in. You want dropped TDP with full performance... but that isn't happening, because the cards are already TDP starved.

It's not about being positive and waiting and seeing. There is mathematically no way to cleave off most of the TDP and keep the performance. Even all of nVidia's cards are generally HUGELY voltage dropped, AND clockspeeds are hindered by 7% still, and they still have issues in badly designed laptops with as little power draw as they are rated for. The desktop performance average, in low TDP envelopes like what would be put in smaller power brick laptops is going to be, at the absolute best, beyond difficult. And at the average, impossible. No need to even go to the "at worst".

I'm not saying the cards cannot exist. I'm saying if a mobile RX 470 that's undervolted and with undervolted memory is expected to hold its 1206MHz boost, it's going to be near 120W, and then it's not going to be put into any laptop that doesn't have a large enough power brick for at least an OC'd 980M or 1070. 180W bricks are out of the question, in general. Super slim laptops which are failing to shove 1060s in them are out of the question too. The entire problem, this whole time, is that they pull too much power.

I don't know why I have to keep re-explaining this. I can't make it any clearer than this right now.

And finally,

If Vega is GCN, it's not hitting mobile. It *WILL* suck way too much power. Vega being GCN would somehow need to be 1.5x stronger while pulling the SAME amount of power as a power-unlocked RX 480 if you want to attempt undervolting core/memory and shove it in laptops using GTX 1080s. And honestly? That just is not happening... on GCN. If it isn't GCN, then that's something else. This is the only way GCN is really going to be realistically in mobile, at all.

 

It would be a complete and utter waste of time for AMD to release a ~100W Polaris 10 card for laptops right now. What they need to do as soon as possible is to release the 35W Polaris 11 card that they specifically intended for mobile. In general, Pascal is more efficient than Polaris, but Nvidia doesn't have anything at that TDP yet.

 

When the GTX 1050 hits mobile, (superclocked GTX 950) it's going to generally hit the laptops that had 965Ms (most 960M-using laptops will overheat with it lol). If at that point AMD doesn't have a 960M replacement, it might be too late.

 

Well, the R9 m470x is considered to be about the same as a GTX 860m / GTX 960m. More or less on the negative side of about.
The RX 460 Laptop is supposed to be similar to the GTX 965m (if I recall correctly). Sadly, it's currently only China-HP exclusive.

 

Stealing thunder from the thread over in the Alienware forums, but the configuration for the Jennifer is up with the RX470 included in the base price:

http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-17-laptop/pd?oc=dkcwg01hddr

 

link doesn't work for some reason.

 

Maybe region locked? I'm viewing from US.

 

What an ugly, plasticy machine! Wow how far have alienware fallen!!

 

Is the RX M470 Polaris though? Wikipedia seems to say that the RX 470 is Polaris 10, but RX M470 (which is what the Alienware has) is a 28nm card from the previous generation.

 

You're thinking of the R 9 m470x, which is the base GPU for the Alpha R2.
This is the RX 470, but why Alienware calls it the RX m470 I don't know. They even call the GTX 1070 (Laptop) GTX 1070m if an error pops up.
I do remember an old table that listed the RX 460 as the RX 480m and the RX 490m as a Polaris 10 GPU. I guess those tables were based on outdated information.

 

You are right, I was looking at the R9. Still, it's not clear what they mean by RX M470, though I suppose you're probably right and it's somebody at Alienware confused about the latest naming schemes.

 

Why so pink? And more importantly why so expensive??? Same as 1060 but performing at best the same, what an utterly stupid move, same as previous tonga variants

 

So the RX M470 is the same price as the 1060. Choice is there, but I realistically can't see much reason why someone would take the M470 over the 1060. Also, all information about anything named "M470" online points to a bonaire chip, which is pitifully weak. I don't get paying more for less performance like this.

I don't get what plastic or looks has to really do with it if it performs its function well and is sturdy.

*not that it is, but I'm making the statement in a vacuum

 

Wonder why they went with RX M470, when it was stated that it was based off the desktop part and while listing the GeForce parts as intended (no Ms)? BTW They want you to get the 4K display with that config, otherwise the following error pops-up: "The AMD Graphics Processing Unit selected is incompatible with the LCD option selected." Not really budget gaming if you ask me. Everything possible not to pick AMD I guess. Not that I care, but no 1080?

 

GTX 1080 comes in November.

Read what I said above (before your post).

 

A lot of the stuff on the page is obviously place-holder and not meant to be public yet, link was found via the usual diving methods. Just interesting to see that the 1060 and the 470, if not placeholder, are the same price as I would have thought the 470 would have been cheaper.

 

It's nothing new from Alienware. The mobile Tonga GPUs were priced (in most regions) higher than the GTX 970m.
Would have wanted to see a cheaper price on the RX 470, though.

 

This page is gone (at least for me), but here's a small outburst. Enjoy!

Placeholder or not, looks pretty working for me. Not realistic pricing at all. I wonder how are things on the desktop side? As I said in the first comment about the new Alienware line, the AMD option is there for - "See there is an AMD option and no one bought it". It's even worse deal than the R9-M295X (I still wonder how they did the pricing, but hey, who am I to say), since here you'll have to cough 400 bucks for a display. You know haw many people got display upgrades, especially on what's supposed to be budget/entry built? Also I find it rather amusing that all the nGREEDIA options are VR ready, AMD is not, but can only be shipped with the 4K display?! MASSIVE LOL!!! Yeah OEMs are not effin around with AMD. No sir not at all. Let's see the "official" site, but I don't hold any hope at all. Wouldn't be surprised if it's crippled in performance as well.

 

Well, they removed the page, but at least the "coming soon" page they replaced it with lists an RX 470 as an option (no more "M").

 

See, this is one of the reasons why I don't want DELL.
They overprice their hardware excessively, do not make it easy to access the said hardware, and they also skimp on cooling and power supply to boot (plus their design is not entirely appealing to me).

 

I took that into consideration too, though I didn't mention it. It's far weaker than any decently-performing 1060. With it being the same price, even if it had the FULL desktop RX 470 performance (including boost to over 1200MHz), it's still give or take 15% weaker on average than a working 1060.

 

Which is not a lot to be honest D2.
And which workloads are we talking about?
Professional software or games (in which case, is it DX11, DX12 or Vulkan)?

I realize DX12 and Vulkan are newcomers, but DX12 is getting far more traction with new games, so it is possible that 470 in a laptop, even if its initially weaker, could gain a significant boost in DX12 and overshoot 1060.

Besides, Nvidia doesn't leave almost any room for undervolting given that their hardware does so automatically at given clock speeds. 470 supports Wattman, so it will be doable to undervolt it at stock (unless AMD and the OEM's who adopt the GPU optimize its voltages out of the box - which would be a first).
It is also possible that it will be doable to overclock the 470 with acceptable undervolt to keep the GPU at a certain level while approaching 1060.

470 desktop in a laptop can be quite powerful... AMD would do well to undervolt it and bin it properly for mobile.

 

Well, if you look at all those laptop reviews of 1060, you can see how it is really underwhelming, performing 10% faster than 980m, which puts it even slightly lower than desktop 470, since the latter is more or less equivalent to 970. That being said, the price asked by AW is still too much, even if rx 470 is performing same as 1060, because AMD's desktop offering is like what? $170? But now they're charging like $700 for it's mobile counterpart? That's just plain stupid.

 

I would go for the 470 too, IF the vBIOS allows lowering the core voltage. For that (and other) reasons i hope for an RX 460 option on the AW 13. Of course there is a huge perfomance gap to the GTX 1060, but i doubt that the cooling solution will be strong nough to prevent throttling and/or extreme temps and noise.

 

The vBios should allow lowering the core (and even VRAM) voltage.
If it is a desktop 470, then there shouldn't be any issues with Wattman.

Are there ANY other OEM's (aside from Dell) thinking about incorporating 470 into laptops?

 

So mobile Polaris 10 comes afterall? IMO it could be a smart way of using lower price for RX 470 based laptops than 1060 because A) majority would still buy Geforce paying more (nvidia is better they say) and B) cost of RX 470 for Alienware must be lower because it's AMD.

P.S. Don't know about marketing BS Nvidia brought about their desktop 1060 but RX480 smashes it in Deus Ex Mankind Divided DX11 and Dx12. So I have a feeling RX 470 mobile is = GTX 1060 mobile.

 

Is it a lot? Not so much. Is it a lot for the same price? You bet your bottom dollar and the next twenty that ends up in the space your bottom dollar had. And again, this is assuming it grants FULL desktop RX 470 performance, and only in most DX11/12/Vulkan scenarios. OpenGL it's even worse than a 15% drop.

Most professional software doesn't matter. Nobody worth their salt is going to buy an entry-level laptop with a consumer GPU to workhorse professional applications. Especially since support will pretty much hang up on you if you don't have a quadro or firepro. For the hobbyist who uses an OpenCL-accelerated program that works in windows and can be properly fed by an AMD mobile GPU, maybe it's more of a pick. But those are going to be rather rare.

No, that will never happen. That's beyond wishful thinking. We've been over this before. By the time DX12/Vulkan becomes mainstream, all the current hardware that we're considering will be far obsolete. And even if it did, all Vulkan/DX12 does for AMD realistically is remove CPU overhead from the driver (which won't help in all situations), unless a developer specifically makes a game extremely AMD-favoured (like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which so heavily favours AMD that you could realistically call it worse "sabotaging" than Gameworks, or how Doom's Vulkan patch enables Async shading on AMD but doesn't do so on nVidia, which should be able to handle the demands).

You do realize, that the desktop 470 requires undervolting to hold its 120W envelope for stock boost speeds. Unlike the desktop, where one can simply raise power limits and get the card performing better, laptops need to be wary of their power consumption. And again, the card can't just suck 150W. If they're undervolting already to keep it down to a ~100W-110W envelope while holding boost, you're not going to get much more actual undervolting out of it. Unless of course, they underclock the thing, which is the most likely approach. If they do, you could probably overclock once more, and attempt to do so while undervolting... but be wary of the fact that you're likely going to end up nearer to around 130W-140W TDP for stock desktop performance with your undervolts.

It's not matching a 1060, ever, no matter how much you hope and wish it could. What it COULD do, is provide an alternative with similar performance to badly-handled 1060s (like the overheating and throttling ones), at a cheaper price. That might get them some sales if the average benchmark from users show that throttling 1060s and working mobile 470s are close enough. However, please be wary that buying any Clevo model with a 1060, or any beefier MSI model with a 1060, instantly means that you're not going to get crap performance.

Of course, all of this hinges on the point that the card will:
- Have a proper mobile video BIOS with full card control
- Be cheaper than the 1060
- Hold a MINIMUM of full-boost 1206MHz desktop RX 470 performance, 24/7 in games
- Have Enduro issues completely fixed. It's been a long time since I've seen an Enduro laptop or heard of people using them. If Enduro isn't at least as problem free as Optimus currently is, game over.

Yeah, this is why I mention that there's a big difference between the garden variety trashtops like the Blade 2016 v2 with the 1060, and a machine like a P670RP6 with a 1060 which can actually hold its proper performance. I found a dude on another forum who ran a benchmark for use in Unigine Heaven on a GS63VR. I could not beat his score with my 780Ms in SLI, which alludes to his card performing properly.

The 1060 is give or take around $450 USD, so that puts the mobile 470 around that price. Still exorbitant, but not $700 at least.

 

Enduro is not worse (or better) than Optimus, i had to manually switch the dGPU with both solutions for certain applications. Thats more like a myth like the statement "Nvidia drivers are better than AMD drivers". Maybe true in the past but today ...

 

I did recall being able to mess around with WattMan (full control) with my RX 480 in the Graphics Amp using the laptop screen, so Enduro was active. Here's a Timespy benchmark run of it in case anyone is interested (given that scenario I ran it, the score can be better using an external monitor). That said, I'm not sure the same could be said about an internal mobile GPU, but it is possible.
Also, the mobile Tonga GPU could have its values adjusted, but you would need to vBIOS edit them (a la an unlocked vBIOS, which is possible on the Alienware laptops, but I don't think anyone ever asked for an unlocked vBIOS for the Alienware Tonga GPUs).

 

I don't think that AMD are the ones that slap the price tag on laptop solutions. Then again, the AMD version does require separate motherboard design (*cough*BGA*cough*) and that extra cost might have a lot to do with it. I wish there were more AMD options to offset the cost, better yet - MXM. Yeah, I'm bringing the BGA here again, but you can see one of the benefits of having slots and sockets.

Here's a post with my take on the DE: MD. All in all, ironically or not, the sub-title (Mankind Divided) comes into play

 

Man, they're still asking too much for an entry-midrange card(( Just compare, 1060 desktop was launched at $250, while RX 470 at ~$170, which is more than 30% difference. If the laptop version was 30, even 20 percent cheaper then it would make so much more sense to choose it over 1060. I'm sure a lot of people would go with AMD (myself included), if only it was priced following this logic.

On a bright side though, do you remember how we were all wishing a card from AMD that would be comparable to 980M in performance and priced one tier lower, i.e. 970M? Well comrades, that time has come but the joy is not there, since Nvidia once again overplayed everyone with it's tactics (strategy if sales remain good) of putting full-blown desktop cards into laptops and suddenly former performance kings as 970M and 980M are now so obsolete. God, why AMD is so late to the party lately? Imagine, if RX 470 priced at 970M level would come just a year earlier, how it would change the game! Same thing happened with M295X, when it was too little too late, just a year earlier it would have nicely competed with 780M, but alas.

 

MXM RX480 starting to show on a Chinese vendor's listing:




Custom built with VR backpacks in mind, not for direct purchase from consumers. Desktop RX480 VBIOS. 150W.

 

This will be interesting to follow. So an RX 480 mobile does exist.

 

THANK YOU!!! Now I have inspiration to resume my project

BTW This is AMD module. I can't see recognizable markings (from other parties). I guess it really is AMD against all.

 

Hmmm, MXM 3.1 they say.

 

Would luv to see some benches! IIRC this one should be on par with the 980m?

Hm, what does that mean? That all 3.0b owners won't be able to sport this one?

 

Uhm... no, the RX 470 should be faster than 980M if I'm not mistaken.
RX 480 should be a bit more above 470.

 

This is the full desktop RX480. It should behave just like a RX480 (hopefully without the stock AMD cooler issues).

 

YAY I'm excited, I'd love to test in my various machines

 

I just hope we get both RX 470 and RX 480 from other laptop OEM's.
Dell is an equivalent of Apple... that's why the price is high.

If other OEM's start adopting AMD in notebooks (I mean come on, we already have various pre-existing games that received support for DX12 and there's bound to be a lot more), then the picture starts changing radically - in which case, RX 470 would even be enough on the mobile end to go against 1060 in DX11 (apart from 1060's in Clevo's) and surpass it at DX12.

I don't know if RX 480 will be much higher... but in DX12 I think it could come dangerously close to mobile 1070 or be its equal (if the thermals and cooling are well executed for AMD - which is almost never the case if history is taken into account - but hey, this time it might be different - and undervolting on AMD gpu's should still be doable using Wattman).

 

If the RX480 could be used in older designs like my P570WM that would be truly awesome!

Shouldn't be a flagship (RX490) around the corner soon?

 

The size looks fine, 3.1 GPUs are just 3.0B ones with support for PCIE 3.0...

 

Hmm, this could be interesting, might even be compatible with my notebook as an upgrade (Maxwell wasn't).

 

M17x R3 and M18x R1 are PCIe 2.0

 

It doesn't matter on desktops, but we all know that MXM can be "a bit" finicky at times. Whatever, well worth the try

 

That shouldn't matter tbh, its just the speed the PCie connection runs at that changes..

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