Since the mods don't want Polaris refresh rumors discussed in the Vega/Navi thread, I decided to open a top-level thread for this discussion. I opened it in the main VC&G board because users may want to discuss comparisons with Nvidia cards and this isn't allowed in the AMD board.
So far, there has been no official announcement (as far as I know) of any RX 500 Series products. But there are various leaks and rumors (here is one of the more comprehensive). Some of what has been suggested so far:
The original consumer Polaris release was unquestionably a disappointment in terms of perf/watt. Polaris is capable of doing much better, and the Polaris 10-based Radeon Pro WX 5100 manages to crank out over 2.7x the TFlops of its Bonaire predecesor (FirePro W5100) in the same form factor and 75W TDP. But the original RX 480 cards were pushed pretty hard in terms of clocks to stay on par with Hawaii and GP106, resulting in perf/watt not much better than Nvidia's 28nm Maxwell despite the node jump. Some of this is architecture (tiled rendering is a huge deal, and Polaris lacks it), but a lot of it is what amounts to factory overclocking. The question is whether a Polaris refresh can do any better. Will RX 580 really be able to hold a steady 1340 MHz while staying under 150W? If so, that would be a fairly big jump in perf/watt. The original RX 480 cards often throttled due to TDP, and could not sustain the 1266 MHz boost clock during actual gaming scenarios.
So far, there has been no official announcement (as far as I know) of any RX 500 Series products. But there are various leaks and rumors (here is one of the more comprehensive). Some of what has been suggested so far:
- The original Polaris chips were on the GloFo 14LPE (Low Power Early) process; RX 500 will be on the superior GloFo 14LPP (Low Power Performance) process.
- To indicate the generational change, the chips will be renamed from Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 to Polaris 20 and Polaris 21. (Some drivers suggest Polaris 10XT2 instead.)
- There will be a new Polaris 12 chip, which will be a smaller GPU featuring only 640 shaders. (This one seems to be fairly solidly established.)
- RX 580 (full P10/P20) will have a relatively modest clock bump over RX 480, up from 1266 to 1340 MHz. The RAM will remain at 8Gbps. RX 570 (cut P10/P20) will increase clocks to 1244 MHz. RX 560 will use the full Polaris 11 (or Polaris 21?) chip, with 1024 shaders, and go up to 1287 MHz.
- Launch is said to be around April 18, to coordinate with Ryzen 5.
The original consumer Polaris release was unquestionably a disappointment in terms of perf/watt. Polaris is capable of doing much better, and the Polaris 10-based Radeon Pro WX 5100 manages to crank out over 2.7x the TFlops of its Bonaire predecesor (FirePro W5100) in the same form factor and 75W TDP. But the original RX 480 cards were pushed pretty hard in terms of clocks to stay on par with Hawaii and GP106, resulting in perf/watt not much better than Nvidia's 28nm Maxwell despite the node jump. Some of this is architecture (tiled rendering is a huge deal, and Polaris lacks it), but a lot of it is what amounts to factory overclocking. The question is whether a Polaris refresh can do any better. Will RX 580 really be able to hold a steady 1340 MHz while staying under 150W? If so, that would be a fairly big jump in perf/watt. The original RX 480 cards often throttled due to TDP, and could not sustain the 1266 MHz boost clock during actual gaming scenarios.