After having played catch up for most of the past two years to their biggest rivals, Intel and NVIDIA, AMD is finally ready to take back the initiative, and that was clearly evident by all the subtle and not so subtle hints dropped by them at the recently concluded CES 2016.
First things first, the heart of every gamer’s PC is the Graphics Processing Unit and this essential component has been stuck in the same old 28nm fabrication process for the past few years, well, no more. Enter Polaris. AMD’s brand new lineup of GPUs moves to the much awaited 14nm FinFET architecture that does wonders for power efficiency and subsequently the thermal output of the card.
This has been one of the sore points of AMD cards of the past as they tended to double as frying pans. However, with the updated architecture, the Polaris lineup is touted to consume half the power that the Maxwell lineup from NVIDIA currently does, a feat that was on open display at this year’s CES. With the advent and rise in popularity of DDR 4 RAM, it was only a matter of time that AMD launched a new line of CPUs seeing as how old their Vishera and Athlon series were getting. The fact that these CPUs have remained relevant for so long is a testament to how good they are, however, they have dropped off significantly to Intel’s offering. Well, rest assured that is all about to change as AMD is planning to launch a brand new socket — the AM4, which will have better single core performance as well as have support for DDR 4 RAM.
AMD also launched a brand new CPU cooler, the wraith cooler, that is much beefier than the stock cooler that they currently offer Before we see the new AM4 chips, we’ll be treated to the AMD FX 8370 CPU which will now support the Wraith Cooler. This 8 core CPU, clocking in at an impressive 4.0 GHz out of the box, will feature upgraded single core performance which will essentially make it the go to CPU for anyone wishing to get i7 like performance at the price of the i5. AMD has started the year with a bang by making all the right moves and by piquing the interests of people the world over.
Rest assured that their resurgence can only be good for the consumer as they will have a plethora of products to choose from for almost any price range.
