AMD Confirms RX 480 At $199 USD, Other APU & Polaris Announcements

If you weren't able to watch the AMD Computex 2016 live-stream happening now, here are my key notes from the event.

The live-stream talked about AMD Polaris GPUs, 7th Gen Mobile APUs, and future tech.

- Yes, the Radeon RX 480 will sell for just $199 USD! This is part of their goal to "bring real VR to the first 100 million people" with "gamers and consumers being left behind" due to cost factors.

- The Radeon RX 480 is being promoted as being competitive with $500 current generation cards like the GTX 980 and R9 390X. There's 4 or 8GB of GDDR5 memory, 150 Watt TDP, AMD FreeSync, premium VR support, 36 compute units, and 256GB/s of memory bandwidth. The RX 480 is said to have 1.7x performance/Watt improvement.

- AMD now talking up Vulkan, particularly about Doom on Vulkan.

- 7th Gen AMD A-Series APU announced.- HEVC / H.265 support heavily being talked up.

- 7th Gen AMD FX 9800P @ 15 Watts is 28% faster for LibreOffice (yes, the LO icon was shown), 44% faster for compression, 43% faster for Photoshop.

- AMD A9 series APUs are designed for sub-$400 notebook PCs.

- Blah... Lots of Windows stuff happening.

- Finally, Zen is being talked about! (53 minutes in for those watching the live stream later on.)

- The Zen Summit Ridge processor was shown off. Still in "early stages of bring-up" but "the product looks good, really good." 40% IPC improvement being talked about, 8 cores / 16 threads, new AM4 desktop platform.

- Zen will sample to priority customers in "few weeks" and roll out in Q3.