[EDIT]hmmm.....whats going on at AMD? (and history of 3Dfx Rampage)

[BoFox]

So.....
Anyone else notice how low the clock speed have been on all the Polaris cards we have heard of?

I have been drawn to this and know it just didn't seem right....well, at the very least it didn't look pretty to me.
Knowing that it is GCN and the consoles are updating to it, it just doesn't seem logical there will be any major gcn changes.  Polaris most likely will be very similar to gcn chips of the past, I don't expect much of an ipc improvement.

Seeing the clock speed and the core count, it seems likely polaris 10 will be pretty slow.  If they don't clock the chip running at least 1000mhz, then it probably will be about as fast as hawaii. The original 290(x).

I have been stuck on this clock speed for awhile.  Why have we seen these clocks so freaking low?

Looks like you're spot-on - there's an apparent confirmation of the finalized clock speed at a mere 1.2GHz.  (Or 1.266 GHz, to be precise:
http://videocardz.com/60824/amd-polaris-...400-series


It might be the boost clock, since the 5.83 TFLOPs count is higher than all other rumors thus far, which say 5.5 TFLOPs.  

This makes it about the same as the R9 290X, just a bit faster than the 390.  Still short of the 390X (5.9 TFLOPs, with 512-bit bus that gives 384GB/s bandwidth).  Even with 20% memory compression, 8MT/s GDDR5 running at 256-bit (yielding 256GB/s total) would still fall short, hurting the card by a couple percentage points overall - perhaps effectively undermining any performance increases from optimizations that a revised GCN architecture would give over Hawaii R9 390X. 

I really don't expect it to beat the 390X or GTX 980.  It'd probably trade blows nicely with a GTX 970, coming out ever so slightly ahead. 

Rumored price is $199, but I don't believe it.  It probably means $229 or $249 - AMD just wants to up the hype especially to hurt GTX 1070 sales.


Now that there's a rumor that Vega (AMD's next card with HBM2 memory) will be released much earlier than expected, Nvidia probably is accelerating their GP102 (gamer-oriented big Pascal) launch as well.  These might be the longest paper launches in history, if HBM2 supply isn't ready...  Nvidia might not even use HBM2 with GP102, and just stick with GDDR5X with a 384-bit bus as usual, in order to beat AMD to the punch once again, while AMD waits for HBM2.
See:  http://wccftech.com/nvidia-gtx-1080-ti-pascal-gp102/

I wouldn't be surprised if NV does GP200 shortly after GP100 is widely available - while GP200 is also available for gamers in a Geforce brand.  Probably to do away with the FP64 double precision stuff just like with Maxwell compared to Kepler.