It has only been a couple of months since AMD revealed its next generation Polaris graphics architecture but looks like the company's Radeon 400 series GPUs are almost ready to start shipping to customers. In fact it looks like we might be looking at April for the very first Radeon 400 series graphics cards to start shipping.

Lenovo has just announced it's brand new lineup of Windows 10 YOGA laptops and tablets for 2016. Some of which as we've discovered featureconfigurations with AMD Radeon 400 series graphics cards and will start shipping this April.

AMD's Radeon 400 Series Graphics Cards Are Almost Here

The systems in question are Lenovo's brand new 15 inch and 14 inch YOGA 510laptops, which will sell under the Flex 4 name in the US. Both the 15 inch and 14 inch version can be configured with dedicated AMD Radeon 400 series graphics cards. The former can be equipped with anR7 M460 and the latter with an R5 M430.

Sadly we don't have detailedspecifications for these 400 series graphics cards just yet, except that they will feature 2GB of video memory. These could very well be the Radeon 400 series GPUs code named "Weston" and "Banks" that we've recently discovered in the Zauba shipping database. Right now we're stuck with these code names and really don't know much beyond in terms of specifications or performance. However, if these GPUs are indeed going to ship beginning this April it shouldn't be too long before all of that information is made available to us.

Speaking more broadly of Polaris, AMD's next generation 14nm graphics architecture. The company is not only promising a historic leap in performance per watt, but has also actually demonstrated this unprecedented jump in power efficiency publicly back in January at CES.

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So far AMD has unveiled two 14nm FinFET Polaris GPUs, given the names Polaris 11 and Polaris 10. A small GPU meant to deliver console-class gaming performance in thin and light notebooks and a large GPU, described as a successor to the Radeon R9 Fury X.

Polaris Is Efficient, Very Efficient

AMD, has only demoed the smallest member of the Polaris familyrunning Star Wars Battlefront at 60 FPS against an Nvidia Maxwell based GeForce GTX 950 graphics card. The Polaris GPU consumed roughly half the power to produce the same framerate. This huge jump in power efficiency is going to play a crucial role in allowing the company to make really high performance mobile graphics cards. In fact it means a de facto doubling of graphics performance for gaming laptops and even desktops.

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Naturally any improvements in performance per watt often translate directly to improvements in actual performance in all graphics card tiers whether we're talking about high-end, mid range or entry level products.This is because the power design envelopes stay mostly unchanged for allgraphics card tiers. This means that a250W Polaris GPUshouldbe twice as powerful as a 250W Nvidia 900 seriesGPU, assuming we see similar power efficiency scaling to what AMD has demonstrated. But Polaris isn't just about power efficiency asit's bringing several new cool features.

Polaris Is Designed For And Built On Samsung's 14nm FinFET Process Technology

AMD’s chief technology officer, Mark Papermaster, announced last yearthat AMD will in fact be leveraging Globalfoundries’14LPP process for CPU, APU and GPU products.

FinFET technology is expected to play a critical foundational role across multiple AMD product lines, starting in 2016, GLOBALFOUNDRIES has worked tirelessly to reach this key milestone on its 14LPP process. We look forward to GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ continued progress towards full production readiness and expect to leverage the advanced 14LPP process technology across a broad set of our CPU, APU, and GPU products. – Press Release

AMD later announcedPolaris and confirmed that it will be manufactured usingthe Samsung/Globalfoundries' 14nm FinFET process technology.

AMD’s Polaris architecture-based 14nm FinFET GPUs deliver a remarkable generational jump in power efficiency. Polaris-based GPUs are designed for fluid frame rates in graphics, gaming, VR and multimedia applications running on compelling small form-factor thin and light computer designs.

14nm FinFET will offer GPUdesign engineers nearly double transistors to play with in the same area as the current 28nm process. 14nm FinFET also has significantly faster switching speeds, which translates to significantly higher clock speeds compared to current 28nm based GPUs. This is all in addition to the drastic power savings enabled by the smaller feature sizes and the move from planar to 3D FinFET gates.

14nm FinFET Technology

Globalfoundries.com

14LPE – Early time-to-market version with area and power benefits for mobility applications

14LPP – Enhanced version with higher performance and lower power; a full platform offering with MPW, IP enablement and wide application coverage

4th Generation Graphics Core NextCompute Units

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The name "Polaris"doesn’t just describe AMD’s 4th generation GCN architecture, but a broadcollection of new visual computing intellectual property. For AMD’s 2016 graphics products the company updated all aspects of its graphics IP. Including the addition of support for DisplayPort 1.3 and HDMI 2.0a in addition to h.265 decode at up to 4K and encode at 4K and 60 FPS.

When it comes tothe GCN ( Graphics Core Next ) engine itself, AMD outlined a number of fundamentalfeatures that define thearchitecture and they include:

– Primitive Discard Accelerator

– Hardware Scheduler

– Instruction Pre-Fetch

– Improved Shader Efficiency

– Memory Compression

One notablenew feature is primitive discard acceleration. Which in no certain terms is AMD’s way of revealing that its upcoming GPUs will add support for additional key DirectX12 features such as Conservative Rasterization.

Furthermore, this list does a great job of showcasing just how advanced modern GPUs have become.Instruction pre-fetch is a techniquethat’s long been employed in CPUs and it works to improve performance by reducing stalls and unnecessarywait times. So it’squite remarkable that this technology is now an indispensablepart ofmoderngraphics engines. Thatreallygoes to show just how complex modern GPUs have become.

It’s important to note though that instruction pre-fetching in GPUs isn’t an entirely new addition, current graphics architectures do support varied levels of pre-fetching. However, these implementations have been traditionally quite limited in nature. With Polaris,AMDis pushingfor a more robust solution to more effectively tackle a broad set ofscenarios in which pre-fetching can be really advantageous.

AMD Radeon Graphics Architectures