Polaris Refresh (RX 500 Series) Rumors

[CatMerc]

RX560 is being marketed as upto 2X faster than R7 360 which is pretty decent.
The RX550 is being marketed as upto 5X faster than IGP. Which IGP is not specified. Probably HD530/630 although i doubt it. More likely to be something even slower like HD510/610?

It says HD530.

AMD better be launching this at cheaper prices than the launch prices of the rx 480/470 then.

The leaked pricing seems too high. Its pretty low to take a rebranded chip that's cheaper to make and charge the same launch pricing of the original chip.

Every other rebrand in history has been dramatically cheaper than the original chip. To price it the same is pretty low, particularly when it is cheaper to make now and is not a new chip design.

Whatever savings they took from the new process looks like it was reinvested into a beefier stock cooler. Notice how it has two fans now and looks like a better heatsink as well (though we need someone to tear it down to see).

Let's assume RX 480 wafers cost 5000$ per unit. This new process would reduce costs to 3000$ per wafer. Sounds great right?
Well, the cost per chip, assuming 200 chips per wafer, goes from 25$ to 15$. That cooler's bill of materials alone probably exceeds the original's by 10$.

The question is if they're charging the same per chip to AIB partners, which would mean fatter margins for AMD, or if they've reduced prices to AIB's, keeping the same margins.

 

[dark zero]

AMD just went mediocre again... No Vega, slow as hell GPUs and even worse, they are overpricing again their products... Seems that the GPU TEAM failed to deliver Vega at time and overpriced the polaris which was getting old...

They even didn't refined the chips!

 

[railven]

Neighbor's basement flooded, thus my basement flooded. Basement PC took severe water damage. RIP 290X.

My home is official Radeon-less. First time...EVER! Feelsbad.jpg

When 390X launched it warranted the asking price compared to the competition. But if the 580X is >$240 and slightly faster than an aging GTX 1060 let alone a <$200 RX 480 - WTH are they thinking?

Is this just to satisfy OEMs? Drawing a blank on AMD's approach here.

 

[CatMerc]

The slides contain a die shot

Spoiler: Large image

Spoiler: Adjusted Colors

Looks like either Polaris 21 or Polaris 12 (can't tell if that's 16 or 8 CU's)

 

[nathanddrews]

So shouldn't the launch prices of RX570/580 be lower than launch price of RX470/480? It should be lower because tech is supposed to get cheaper every year.

Yes, isn't that what I tried to show using Hawaii/Grenada? They will be (should be) lower launch prices than the original, but not only that, priced according to where the performance sits relative to NVIDIA's lineup, but don't expect them to be lower than the closeout/rebate prices are currently. Only a couple more days and we'll know for sure...

 

[raghu78]

Completely different markets and development. Trying to compare and say it is the same thing is a special combination of ignorance and stupidity.

CPU's are dramatically more expensive to develop with longer development cycles.

It's why AMD even on a bad Cpu architecture, stayed on the course for years at a time.

No one refers to CPU refreshes as rebranding for this very reason. The development costs are so extreme with x86 CPU's that it is understood products get more minor updates and refreshes.

In a addition, a 10% improvement for the same cost is a fail in the GPU industry for successive products. If this type of pattern starts happening in the GPU industry we will be in the development hell where we will have to wait 6 or 7 years before performance doubles like the CPU industry.

7970($550) --> 280x($299)
gtx 680($499)-->($399)
7870($350)-->($199)
8800gt($230) -->($180)
290x($550)-->390($429)
r9 285($250) -->r9 380($200)

AMD launching it's rebrand with the same price as its predecessor is completely new in the videocard industry. If Nvidia follows suit, it could signal a very sharp drop off in GPU progress for both performance and price to performance. The fact that these cards are cheaper to produce now because of this new LPC(which emphasizes a reduction in cost) process with minimal development costs means AMD should be passing on some of the savings to their customers. This type of pricing is hardly going to stimulate sales for AMD and it leaves AMD wide open to a counter.

Remember the r9 285 launch which people were ho hum about because pricing was a tad too high. Nvidia launched the gtx 970 shortly after and it made AMD look greedy.

The HD 7970 -> R9 280X , HD 7870 to R9 270X and R9 290X to R9 390X transitions took 18 months. Polaris is less than 10 months old. So do not expect price cuts to Polaris other than slight clock speed increase and rebrand at same price. By late Q1 2018 or early Q2 2018 when Volta arrives we will see the next major transitions.

 

[unseenmorbidity]

Pricing is being released.

Gigabyte Tech Radeon RX 580 PCIe Graphics Card, 4GB GDDR5 = $203

Gigabyte Tech Radeon Gamin RX 570 PCIe Graphics Card, 4GB GDDR5 = $183

Gigabyte Tech Radeon RX 550 PCIe 3.0 Graphics Card, 2GB GDDR5 = $85
MSI Radeon RX 580 ARMOR 4G OC Graphics Card= $207

 

[tential]

It's not lie, it's called marketing. Companies take best case scenario, and put "up to" or footnote that says "we got these results in our conditions, during full Moon night while hungry wolves were howling"

They could take Tahiti with worst single precision GFlops/watt ratio (which I think is ~14) and Polaris 10 with best (~40), and say it has 2.8x perf/watt. And that won't be a lie. Of course, people don't care about single precision GFlops, but FPS in games. But it's users fault since they ignore available information. If you are buying new product you'll use for the next couple of years, then you should take few hours and look all specs and details of the product.

Regarding R7 360 vs RX 560, it says up to 2x. And as someone mentioned, it is easy to find that scenario due to VRAM differences (just test some new AAA game on ultra settings). But user should take a look at specs (CUs, clocks, VRAM, architecture) and know it's more likely to be ~1.6x (avg FPS). As I said, I expect it to be somewhere between 1050 and 1050 Ti.

I really don't see why people whine about card refresh/rebrand, price, performance, TDP... It's a product like any other. If it suits your requirements, you'll buy it. If not, you won't. No-one can force me to buy GPU at price I don't like to play unoptimized games on day1 with crazy system requirements. I can wait. Last year I wanted to upgrade my R7 260X with new Polaris model. But 460 wasn't worth it, while 470 was to expensive. So I didn't buy any. It's AMDs (and game publishers) loss, not mine. Now I might take RX 560

"It's not a lie, it's called marketing".
Incorporating myself Monday so that I can never lie again. I'd actually probably get more benefits

 

[Bouowmx]

Ayy: Radeon RX 570 at 180 USD and 550 at 85. Shop is nuts.

 

[Ajay]

I don't think there's been any indication that it is, and I don't even know if Global Foundries has it yet. My thinking was that Vega is using it, but I think Polaris is still probably on LPP, just a more mature process as the 480 cards that have been released more recently are capable of much better OCs than those sold at release.

I haven't been able to find any info linking GloFo to 14 LPC or 14 LPU. LPU would be better for Vega, I would think, since it would offer higher clocks at the same power consumption. Both of these processes are very new to Samsung, so they won't certainly won't be used on Polaris or Vega.

 

[Mopetar]

Says 3rd gen on this slide,

Good catch.

I haven't been able to find any info linking GloFo to 14 LPC or 14 LPU. LPU would be better for Vega, I would think, since it would offer higher clocks at the same power consumption. Both of these processes are very new to Samsung, so they won't certainly won't be used on Polaris or Vega.

LPC and LPU are just updates to their existing 14nm process, so they probably don't differ too greatly. AMD does always have the option of using Samsung after they updated their agreement with Global Foundries. It's not hard to believe that with Ryzen now launched and other Zen CPU products in the pipeline that GF is at capacity anyways so AMD might have Vega or other parts being manufactured at Samsung, especially for the high-end, high-margin parts.

 

[CatMerc]

I haven't been able to find any info linking GloFo to 14 LPC or 14 LPU. LPU would be better for Vega, I would think, since it would offer higher clocks at the same power consumption. Both of these processes are very new to Samsung, so they won't certainly won't be used on Polaris or Vega.

14 LPU might be a bit too new, but I don't believe 14 LPC is. It could very well be used in this refresh.

 

[.vodka]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/65h28y/rx_580_and_rx_570_release/

My local Fry's has both of these for sale, XFX brand. Aren't these supposed to be released later?

Edit: RX580 1425MHz and RX 570 1284MHz -- http://imgur.com/a/vAsn0
There weren't any price tags and I didn't ask the employee to ring it up.
Edit2: RX 580, $269. My friend bolted over and asked once I told him about these. He didn't buy on

1425MHz out of the box for this particular RX580. That's pretty high for Polaris all in all, I wonder if there's some more OC headroom here.

Too bad it's gonna be bottlenecked pretty bad by the memory...

 

[CatMerc]

I did some calculations, and something changed in terms of the ratio in size between CU's and the DDR PHY. Therefore when calculating from Polaris 10 die shots, I got two possible sizes for Polaris 12:
Calculating from 8 CU's: ~61mm^2
Calculating from 32bit DDR PHY: ~85.5mm^2

I'll go with the second one.


Edit: Looks like AMD accidentally leaked new driver features

Turbo Vsync sounds like Fast Sync, while PRIME Efficiency leaves me with several questions.

First, I thought that Power Efficiency already does that, so what does PRIME Efficiency do differently then?
Second, is this a feature that requires hardware only available in 500 series? Updated power controls?

 

[dajeepster]

Gigabyte RX570 in the wild.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1871448.0

 

[mohit9206]

Pricing is being released.

Gigabyte Tech Radeon RX 580 PCIe Graphics Card, 4GB GDDR5 = $203

Gigabyte Tech Radeon Gamin RX 570 PCIe Graphics Card, 4GB GDDR5 = $183

Gigabyte Tech Radeon RX 550 PCIe 3.0 Graphics Card, 2GB GDDR5 = $85
MSI Radeon RX 580 ARMOR 4G OC Graphics Card= $207

Pricing is fine for rx570 and 580 but $85 for 550? This piece of crap is basically half of RX460 which sells for $100 so $70 should have been the maximum for this card. At $85 this makes no sense. And with rx560 expected to be $120,it would be more than twice as fast for $30 more. Low end cards are absolutely the worst value.

 

[unseenmorbidity]

Pricing is fine for rx570 and 580 but $85 for 550? This piece of crap is basically half of RX460 which sells for $100 so $70 should have been the maximum for this card. At $85 this makes no sense. And with rx560 expected to be $120,it would be more than twice as fast for $30 more. Low end cards are absolutely the worst value.

Low end cards still cost a lot to make, which is why their Perf/$ sux. The 460 price dropped quickly, and that is likely the case for the 550 too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/65h28y/rx_580_and_rx_570_release/

1425MHz out of the box for this particular RX580. That's pretty high for Polaris all in all, I wonder if there's some more OC headroom here.

Too bad it's gonna be bottlenecked pretty bad by the memory...

Is this a 2 or 2.5 slot card?

1500 mhz oc could be common.

They really screwed up by not putting faster memory on there. The 8gb cards might be worthwhile this time.

 

[piesquared]

Pricing is fine for rx570 and 580 but $85 for 550? This piece of crap is basically half of RX460 which sells for $100 so $70 should have been the maximum for this card. At $85 this makes no sense. And with rx560 expected to be $120,it would be more than twice as fast for $30 more. Low end cards are absolutely the worst value.

Few will buy it for a GPU upgrade. It is most likely for OEM Ryzen builds without a GPU. Considering the savings OEMs will have with Ryzen CPUs, an $85 RX 550 doesn't seem at all unreasonable.

 

[ConsoleLover]

Seems rather good, though again the prices seem way too inflated. If custom cards really do come factory OC'd at about 1400 or more, that is good 2-5% better performance depending on the game. And if you can gain an additional say 50mhz additional manual OC, you are set.

It will definitely beat out the 1060 in many of the DX11 titles it is currently losing. Not all, some like GTA 5, Watch Dogs 2, Crysis 3, etc... are way too in nvidia's favor, but other DX11 titles will perform better on the RX 580.

Sure you can OC the 1060 and equalize things a bit, but if the 580 can OC to stable 1450mhz, it will be hard even for OC'ed 1060's to beat that.

But again we'll have to wait and see, even now you can OC some 480's to 1425mhz, but the power consumption goes through the roof, consuming up to 200W, rising the temperature significantly, again you need high voltage which means constantly running higher voltage and long term degrading the card, reducing its longevity.

 

[mohit9206]

Few will buy it for a GPU upgrade. It is most likely for OEM Ryzen builds without a GPU. Considering the savings OEMs will have with Ryzen CPUs, an $85 RX 550 doesn't seem at all unreasonable.

Oem ryzen pre built with rx550 will be marketed and sold as gaming PC for the people who have no idea that it is crap for gaming.
I can see Ryzen 1600+rx550 with 16gb ram being sold for $800 or something.
For home htpc just for video output oem won't use rx550 because that would be too expensive. Instead they will use $30 GT 710 or something equally cheap.

 

[unseenmorbidity]

AMD Radeon RX 580: first benchmarks and overclocking

All tests were performed on RX 580 clocked at 1360 MHz. Shortly put, results are comparable to RX 480 with the same frequency.

Like I said earlier, this XFX RX 580 model has just one 8-pin power connector. He explained to me that there were issues with Radeon Software Wattman, so increasing power limit out of question. His card did run at 1500 MHz with increased voltage, but it was affected by power bug, which basically lowered the GPU clock and final result in the process. The most stable configuration was 1480/8500 MHz with +12 mV on GPU.

 

[mohit9206]

I don't think this needs saying but i hope they benchmark and compare with rx470 and 480 with latest drivers instead of just printing last year's benchmarks of 470 and 480 when they review 570 and 580.
Some review sites are known for using old benchmarks for comparison because they can't find the time to re benchmark again or because they're lazy. Rx470 and 480 have gained performance since their launch and need to re tested for a fair comparison with 570 and 580 cards.

 

[Bouowmx]

Videocardz database is populated with some AMD Radeon RX 550 models: https://videocardz.net/gigabyte-radeon-rx-550-2gb-gaming-oc/

Half of Polaris 11 still needs 2 slots and 2 fans :/

 

[IEC]

From a reddit user who got a card early:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/65i06a/picked_up_an_xfx_rx_580_today/

This is not the top-end XFX card, but the middle tier GTS. 1425 MHz clock. He reports that Afterburner shows default voltage at 950mV, though I would take that with a grain of salt.

 

[JDG1980]

All tests were performed on RX 580 clocked at 1360 MHz. Shortly put, results are comparable to RX 480 with the same frequency.

That was expected, since the 500 series is a respin. What I'd like to know (and it doesn't look like this leaker tested) is whether perf/watt goes up compared to the corresponding 400 series cards.

Like I said earlier, this XFX RX 580 model has just one 8-pin power connector. He explained to me that there were issues with Radeon Software Wattman, so increasing power limit out of question. His card did run at 1500 MHz with increased voltage, but it was affected by power bug, which basically lowered the GPU clock and final result in the process. The most stable configuration was 1480/8500 MHz with +12 mV on GPU.

1480 MHz with a fairly mild overvolt is not bad at all. I'd be interested to see what wattage at this speed looks like.
If Polaris can do this well, then this is good news for Vega, which was specifically designed for higher clocks.