Next to the new Zen CPU microarchitecture and GPU plans for 2016, AMD also announced its 2015 GPU plans at its Financial Analyst Day 2015 presentation.
At this point, AMD did not name any specific desktop GPUs but did announce that over the course of the next few months we would be seeing a new set of desktop-class AIB (Add-in-Board) graphics cards at an industry event. Of course, there's no need to guess that this is the Radeon 300-series.
The new GPUs will come with support for Microsoft's upcoming DirectX12, along with support for AMD's LiquidVR and FreeSync. Most notably, however, the new GPUs will come with HBM memory, which is essentially 3D-stacked DRAM, which is said to not only be more efficient than GDDR5, but also much faster. We don't know yet what the actual performance benefits will be in gaming, but it's certainly something we're very excited about.
On the mobile side, AMD also announced the new Radeon M300 series graphics parts. These are built to be more efficient and should be ideal for operating in parallel with A-Series APUs in notebooks. Naturally, they will also feature support for DirectX12.
With all the developments in virtual reality, we're happy to see that the new desktop-class GPUs will have support for LiquidVR. Whether it will be widely adopted remains to be seen, but what is interesting is that it leverages several of the features we've slowly been informed about over the last few months, including asynchronous shaders, Direct-To-Display, Affinity Multi-GPU, and the latest data latch for more efficient GPU-based head-tracking.
Unfortunately, at press time no official details have been made available regarding the actual specifications of the new GPUs. If you're still waiting for these, you'll have to sit tight a little longer.
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There's a new product that's coming out every year.
That is why I hate percentages. They can be extremely deceiving. Say the GDDR5 uses 20w, so the new uses 10w. It's very deceiving for performance charts as well. It'll say GPU A is 20% faster than GPU B, but the reality turns out to be 14 more FPS for a price difference of $100.
Also, ever heard of delays? They happen. Often. For every company. Arctic Islands may not come out as soon as you think.