At E3 AMD announced two new GPUs to complement its already introduced RX480. These GPUs, based on Polaris 11 (the smaller chip) are known as the RX 470 and the RX 460.
We know very little about the details of these cards but AMD claims that the 470 is perfect for 1080p gaming while the 460 is ideal for MOBA and other less demanding e-sports titles. They are also expected to be power efficient and it appears as though 460 does not have a PCIE power connector so a sub-75W TDP is expected. It is also expected that both of these GPUs will be making it into mobile applications such as laptops and it is rumored Apple will be using them in their next generation Macbooks.
These cards should be very interesting options for more casual and 1080p gamers at a very attractive price point.
The cards will launch along side 480 on June 29th and are expected to be priced at $150 and $100 respectively.
With the announcement of these two GPUs nearly all of the quoted Polaris price points ($100-$300) are covered except for the very high end. RX 490 should release sometime in July, and feature a full, non power limited version of Polaris 10 found in RX 480. It should cost around $300.
Remember though that these contracts aren't huge revenue makers and the margins are actually quite small. Just look at the console contracts. They saved AMD but they aren't huge money makers. This contract should help out more than those with better margins but it won't be massive. Should certainly help with increasing market share though and any sales are better than none.
I outlined this in the thread below, but I think that they are making such low dividends with the current console contracts because they were aware of Microsoft and Sony's intention to do incremental upgrades, meaning that if they could get the contract, that they would have the contract basically indefinitely. No reason to release a whole new console if you can do regular incremental upgrades. So I expect that the dividends will be higher for an Apple contract that it is for the consoles. Not huge, but with the number of units sold, then it should make for a very sizeable source of revenue.
Well that might be a reason, and it is something interesting to consider, but it is also just likely that they couldn't get any more. A whole PS4 only costed $400 new. The APU inside is a very small part of that and it was actually quite a large chip too. So margins will be low.
AMD didn't care because they were essentially desperate.
The other flaw I have with your theory is that it really doesn't matter if it is an incremental upgrade. AMD doesn't care. They would get in the PS4 and then the PS5 when that came. Units sold would probably be about the same and it would actually be cheaper for them because they wouldn't have to make two chips at the same time to supply two revisions of the same console.
Okay so I did some rough calculations of the die size shown on the RX 470 by using the relatively industry standard 6-pin power connector's plastic housing.
My best guess at the size is 311mm² for Polaris 10. This puts it 127mm² smaller than Hawaii, and 87mm² smaller than GM204, at roughly the same [rumored] performance.
That's my final answer, and I kinda hope I'm wrong and it's sub-300mm².
But 470 is Polaris 11? So what are you taking the dimensions of Polaris 11 and then making an assumption about the size of Polaris 10? Also wasn't the die size on Hawaii 438mm? So if Polaris 10 was 311 that'd be a difference of 127mm. not a huge difference but just sayin.
I was under the impression that 480 and 470 were both Polaris 10, and the 460 would be 11? Since Vega takes the large-die approach rather than Polaris?
And yeah I messed up my numbers, fixed now.
Edit: If the 470, the card in Lisa's right hand, is indeed Polaris 11 than that is massive for what it is. I would expect low 200mm² (or less) for that kind of card on 14nm.
Su and others said several times that Polaris will be for the $100-$300 market. We have the 480 at around $200. The 470 will be $150 and the 460 $100. So what is up at that higher end around $250-$300? I'd assume the 490 with Vega being the next Fury. So with that in mind (plus 480 apparently having a sorta odd number of CUs) it made sense to me that 490 is full Polaris 10, 480 is a cut version. 470 is full Polaris 11 with 460 being a cut version. Of course that is all speculation.
I do agree with you that 470 does look massive and I'd expect it to be smaller but again that, and your calculations, could be skewed so we really don't know. What you're saying does certainly make sense but at the same time the other situation seems likely too. It just fits well. That could of course be completely wrong.
Thing that annoys me though is If they are going to go the whole incremental upgrade route on consoles every couple of years then JUST put the sodding apu on a riser slot and give it a sodding pcie expansion slot as well... JOB DONE
I hate throw away consumerism... I imagine landfills full of ipad 1's one day
I think vendors are being silly by not lowering prices on existing 390/390x's etc as when the 480 ships it practically makes them redundant.
I am really interested in 470... Freesync and performance bump for reasonable price compared to my 270X... 6 pin power, so it should be fine for extra power, not an issue for cooling... Please, overclock well... Neither of my CPU or GPU like to move even 100mhz in any direction... So yeah...
My calculations put it at about 280mm. The rumor for Polaris 10 has been 232mm. Polaris 11 has 1280 SPs Polaris 10 has 2560 (presumably) SPs Compare that to the 28nm versions. The 390x (which is the uncut version) has 2816 SPs The 370x has 1280 SPs So those are the closest things that we have in the 300 series to Polaris 10 and 11. They have sizes of 212 and 438mm. Assuming that the die they showed is roughly 300mm, that puts it more in line with a shrunken 390x than a shrunken 370x. Makes me think that is Polaris 10. But from a realistic stand point, we would assume that it is Polaris 11 and that the uncut Polaris 10 will be 490. So it is a bit confusing. I guess we wil have to wait for official specs before we know things for sure.
I estimate that they make roughly $10 profit from each console sold (estimates are that Sony pays $100 per chip and I am estimating roughly $90 to produce the chip), so very low dividends. My point about them really wanting the contract for an incremental upgrade is that they are locked in with AMD for future increments. nVidia can't make a faster version of AMD's tech. Can't be done. So they are now forced to stick with AMD for the life time of the incremental upgrade units (ie until a brand new XBox and Playstation come out), then nVidia will have a chance again to secure the contract. I wouldn't call it desperation as much as a very prudent move. No doubt that they were in serious need of more income which likely factored in to them being willing to have low dividends, but it is still a smart move. The two most popular consoles right now are AMD and will all future revisions (which there may be many) will be AMD as well. They have secured themselves a contract for a good long time.
But you also have to consider that they were looking at making the move to a new node at the time that they made the contracts. Selling a lot of units of the new node will make the transition cheaper. They likely had in mind that the revisions of the consoles would be on the new node, thus helping them to make the transition which will lower the cost for them to get things up and running to make their gpus and cpus. It was a very smart move to do everything possible to get in those consoles.
I don't think the XBox One S is going to be comparable to a 480 at all GPU wise unless the price of the console was higher (like $500+) or they are selling it at a massive loss while hoping that the games would make up for the cost of the system or the CPU is bad enough that it bottlenecks the RX 480 equivalent. We may see a RX 470 equivalent which will be able to keep up with the PS NEO.
