Early this week, rumors concerning the latest generation of “Arctic Island” FinFET GPUs by Advanced Micro Devices, have been confirmed. The rumors first leaked in October of last year, and referenced three new GPUs names Greenland, Ellesmere and Baffin, with production set to start this year.
Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD, has also provided some reference to the rumors, in the third quarter of 2015, during an earning teleconference:
“...We are also focused on delivering our next-generation GPUs in 2016 designed to improve performance per watt by 2X compared to our current offerings, based on design architectural enhancements, as well as advanced FinFET process technology...”.
Last Tuesday, tech publication WCCF Tech has confirmed the rumors, citing multiple sources. AMD’s upcoming line of Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 FinFET GPUs, are designed to deliver performance that will bring consumers a lot closer to high-resolution VR gaming than what’s currently available.
This is also great news for Apple, as the new GPUs are rumored to be integrated in new MacBooks, as early as this year. While it’s unlikely that MSI, Microsoft or Asus will lose any sleep over this, the idea of a MacBook as a high-end gaming device could spell trouble for other compating PC makers that don’t have access to high-performance discrete GPUs, like NVIDIA or AMD, especially when iMac and MacBook devices are expected to deliver twice the graphic performance, with the new chips.
While a formal announcement is expected at WWDC, it’s possible that Apple will wait until the back-to-school shopping season, before unveiling any new refresh of its product lines, especially in regard to 21 inch and 27 inch Retina iMacs.