AMD reveals Radeon Pro Duo record-fast graphics cards, Polaris 10 and 11 positioning for mainstream devices
AMD has made a few announcements for upcoming graphics cards. The first one sees the launch of the Radeon Pro Duo, which is described to be the world’s fastest graphics cards to date.
The Radeon Pro Duo was created with the power of combined Fiji GPUs and 8GB of HBM memory, Gamingbolt reported. What this resulted to is the ability to have 16 teraflops of computing power, with the aptly paired price tag of US$1,499 (approx. AU$1961).
The Radeon Pro Duo also has three Display output, a dedicated closed-loop liquid cooler and an HDMI port. The last feature is made compatible with VR systems like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, further solidifying its goal target.
Clockspeed sees an improvement with up to 1000 MHz pegged for the graphics card. The level of performance of the graphics card is not merely for gaming, as can be seen in the lack of the “Fury” counterpart to its name. Instead, the target market of the AMD Radeon Pro Duo is more for VR content creators.
The other graphics chip that AMD has been working on is the Polaris 10 and 11. These new graphic cards, however, are meant for the gaming notebook and mainstream desktop segments. AMD’s Roy Taylor revealed to Ars Technica that the target market is also those who want to avail of VR-ready systems.
Compared to the first VR, which is more of a prosumer approach to VR systems, the Polaris 10 and 11 appear to be geared more towards the mainstream users interested in VR.
“The reason Polaris is a big deal is because I believe we will be able to grow that TAM [total addressable market] significantly,” said Taylor to Ars Technica.
The company is going against Nvidia’s Pascal approach, which is to target the high-end market. AMD’s goal, on the other hand, is to see this TAM expand in terms of the consumer market.
What this suggests is that AMD will be offering mainstream-geared graphics card that still pushes the power to meet the VR systems. AMD has yet to unveil all of the details for the Polaris graphics cards. The source does state that more will be revealed at Computex before the month of May ends.
