Monday, March 20th 2017
AMD's Upcoming RX 500 Rebrands to use LPP Process - Higher Clocks, Lower Power
AMD's upcoming RX 500 series of graphics cards is not going to set the world on fire with its feature-set. Essentially rebrands of AMD's mainstream Polaris GPUs used in current-generation RX 400 series, these have recently seen a slight delay on its time to market - now set at April 18th.
While architecture-level adjustments to this new series of cards so as to improve performance seem to be off the table, AMD is apparently looking to take advantage of manufacturing maturing and process improvements. The original Polaris 11 and Polaris 10 chips were manufactured using the Low Power Early (LPE) process, which looks to balance availability, yields, and time-to-market with performance and power. New reports peg the new dies to carry the Polaris 21 and Polaris 20 monikers, and will feature higher clocks on account of the new Low Power Performance (LPP) process.
As to the higher clocks, these apparently are only responsible for bridging the gap between the RX 480's reference and custom boards. The RX 580 will reportedly carry a 1340 MHz clock (74 MHz more than the reference RX 480), with the RX 570 carrying a much less significant 38 MHz increase over its RX 470 counterpart. The Radeon RX 560 will apparently make do with a clock speed of 1287 MHz.
These clock improvements only go so far as to allow AMD to claim a measure of increased performance comparing to their previous-generation, same architecture, one-year-old graphics cards. Vega is the only product from the company which will have some semblance of originality. A shame AMD didn't adopt some of Vega's refinements to its mainstream graphics cards.
Source:
BenchLife
While architecture-level adjustments to this new series of cards so as to improve performance seem to be off the table, AMD is apparently looking to take advantage of manufacturing maturing and process improvements. The original Polaris 11 and Polaris 10 chips were manufactured using the Low Power Early (LPE) process, which looks to balance availability, yields, and time-to-market with performance and power. New reports peg the new dies to carry the Polaris 21 and Polaris 20 monikers, and will feature higher clocks on account of the new Low Power Performance (LPP) process.
These clock improvements only go so far as to allow AMD to claim a measure of increased performance comparing to their previous-generation, same architecture, one-year-old graphics cards. Vega is the only product from the company which will have some semblance of originality. A shame AMD didn't adopt some of Vega's refinements to its mainstream graphics cards.
62 Comments on AMD's Upcoming RX 500 Rebrands to use LPP Process - Higher Clocks, Lower Power
www.amd.com/en-us/who-we-are/corporate-information/leadership/raja-koduri
Ever heard of him? His quote was and I am paraphrasing "more efficient than a 1080" and referenced a pair of 480's in crossfire.
If that bothers you, well no skin off my back.
RX400 -> 500 transition brings no actual improvements other than the process refinement. Clocks will be rather the same, nothing new will be added, and maybe we will get some better efficiency, but nothing groundbreaking.
What more easier it is to offer a driver update which prevents the card taking too much power out of the PCI-E bus? It is only stated that the too much of a power from the PCI-E bus suffers a minority amount of motherboards with poor power designs.
The RX295X2 pulls way more then that RX480 does over PCI-E. Some OC'ers had burned traces on their 24pins ATX connector by going nuts on LN2.
Seconds concerning top RX295X2... LN2 etc... are you high?
74 is 6% of 1200AMD caught up with 1060 a while ago (that's DX11). In DX12 it is ahead.
+6% will give it comfortable lead.
Like it or not, the performance summary still shows 1060 ahead. I know you really want the 480 to be a faster card but on average that's not the case.
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_1060_Armor/30.html
The 480 is usually a better buy because of Nvidia's stupid pricing, but the 1060 is generally faster at anything but the handful of DX12 or Vulkan games, and Nvidia has been working on the performance there in the last few driver updates.
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_1060_Armor/12.html
Half a frame behind at 1080p, looks like the difference between the cards is that the 1060 is faster at every DX11 game, and just behind in DX12 games. Just how long are you willing to stick to a 480 to make that jump in performance really worth it while everyone else is playing DX11 games that are still coming out in 2017?
I also don't normally stick with cards that long out side of the 7950's I have. I play at 4k and with two cards that were purchased at separate times. The 480's fit my needs better. I am personally waiting to see what Vega does and to see if nvidia can release something with a short pcb that will fit in my case. If the 1080Ti hit with a water block and sub 10" pcb I would own one, but it sounds like I'll be waiting for Vega to do that.