AMD on Monday unveiled its fourth-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. Polaris is significant in that it moves from the tired 28nm manufacturing process to a revitalized 14nm FinFET process which, according to Radeon Technologies Group SVP and Chief Architect Raja Koduri, results in the largest performance-per-watt jump in the company's history (which also includes ATI).

The Polaris architecture features AMD's 4th generation Graphics Core Next (GCN)architecture, a next-generation display engine with support for HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3, and next-generation multimedia features including 4K h.265 encoding and decoding.