AMD unveils 14nm Polaris GPU architecture

The rest of the games industry might hibernate around this time of year but, after a dull 2015, there is life in the GPU scene once more. AMD has unveiled its 14nm GPU architecture, FinFET Polaris, or Polaris among friends.

The headline feature is dramatically reduced power consumption (down 61% on Nvidia's GTX 950 running Battlefront at 1080p 60fps), and while I'd wait for impartial verification, it's enough to make me crook an eyebrow. Improved efficiency is essential if laptop gaming is to become more than a half-tolerable slog. I should know—I spent Christmas at my parents' house.

In addition, Polaris supports HDMI 2.0a—bringing it into parity with Nvidia—and DisplayPort 1.3 along with 4K 60fps h.265 encoding.

The video above boasts lots of AMD officials talking excitedly about these advancements, but we'll have to get closer to April before details emerge on the hardware proper. That ought to give Nvidia a chance to respond with some new info on their Pascal architecture, too. Pass the popcorn.

“Our new Polaris architecture showcases significant advances in performance, power efficiency and features,” Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD said. “2016 will be a very exciting year for Radeon™ fans driven by our Polaris architecture."

I like to think she yelled "™!" in the middle of a board meeting.