Computex 2016 – AMD Announces RX 480 Polaris GPU & Upcoming ZEN Processor Series

Computex has been delivering wave after wave of announcements from various companies, but all eyes were on one today: AMD. For what has seemed an eternity, we were finally given confirmation of three new product ranges – The latest generation of mobile APUs, the first Polaris GPU, and AMD’s biggest update in CPU technology in nearly a decade, ZEN.

It has to be said that the world was only really interested in two key product announcements today, and with good reason. While NVIDIA’s Pascal has just come out, it was AMD’s turn to show us what it’s capable of in the latest generation of GPUs. While we’ve been hearing the word “Polaris” a lot the last few months, there was no card to go with it – now there is. AMD’s first dive into the latest round of the ongoing GPU war is the Radeon RX 480, with a starting price of $199.

Radeon RX 480

While NVIDIA is starting off with the big guns in the premium, and often out-of-reach for most, $400+ market range, AMD’s focus is on the mid range; bringing the biggest bang per buck. With all eyes set on VR, AMD wants to bring the joy of VR to the masses, as quickly and cheaply as possible. The price point of $199 puts the RX 480 right in the budgets of most PC gamers, and it offers a very cool and competitive 5 TFLOPS of compute to go with it.

The last GPU in this price range from AMD was the R9 380 – the same $199 price point, but with only 3.5 TFLOPS of compute. It was no slouch, but not quite enough to deliver the 90 FPS required for many VR games. The new RX 480 offers the same performance as the R9 390, but at $130 less. This aggressive pricing and performance will likely be the real winner for AMD. While it lacks a lot of the fanfare of the world’s fastest GPU, these new RX 480s will likely be selling fast for entrants into the VR experience on a budget (although, you still need to swallow the bitter pill of the $600-$800 price for the VR headset).

By the specs, the RX 480 sits between the 380 and 390, but its actual performance might be slightly different. Matching the performance of the 390 with a narrower bus and less compute units means that there are a number of advancements in the architecture as well, and that doesn’t even take into account that it’s running on nearly half the power. The joys of 14nm manufacturing and FinFET transistors. However, Polaris is a range of GPUs, and we are going to be seeing more of them as time goes on. Availability of the RX 480 is expected to be out by the end of June. You can be sure that we’ll be getting one of these bad boys in for review soon.

It’s All About The ZEN

This is a tricky one, since it requires a fair bit of back-story that’s beyond this article, however, AMD showed off the first, live presentation of its latest CPU architecture that it’s been working on for the best part of 4 years. ZEN is meant to be a complete overhaul of AMD’s CPU business, from desktops to servers, mobile to embedded systems.

At the moment, the details are fairly limited, apart from knowing that the first CPU from the Summit Ridge family is real. Starting with a new socket, AM4, the new ZEN CPU will perform 40% more Instructions Per Clock that the previous generation, and come on a 8 core 16 thread package. The new CPUs will be based on the same 14nm manufacture process as Polaris, so we expect to see some impressive power savings too.

Now, will the CPU match the performance crown that has been held by Intel for so long? That’s up for a very heated debate. If the improvements are real, then AMD is certainly going to be a contender, especially with regard to its APU line, coupled with the improvements seen from Polaris.

ZEN is currently being sampled to select partners in the server market, as AMD has big plans for the CPU, with high scalability at its core. Greater access should be available by Q3, and on sale by the end of the year. This is certainly an interesting time for AMD in the CPU market, and there are great expectations from ZEN.