AMD’s New RX 500X GPUs are OEM Rebrands, Not New Cards

AMD’s New RX 500X GPUs are OEM Rebrands, Not New Cards

AMD technically just launched a new lineup of GPUs this week, but don’t worry if you can’t find them on store shelves. The new 500X family adds an “X” to the brand of each previous Radeon card. The Radeon RX 580 is now the RX 580X, the 570 is the 570X, etc, etc, right on down the stack. But that’s literally the only changes to these cards.

The RX 580X is an RX 580. The RX 570X is an RX 570. The RX 560X is… you get it.

Gamers tend to dislike these periodic rebranding efforts, but they’ve been a feature (or “feature”) of the GPU market for decades. GPU companies often keep low-end models around for 2-3 refresh cycles, or split the low and higher ends of the market between a suite of upper-level cards that are refreshed more rapidly, while lower-end models on outdated process nodes may bump along for a longer period of time.

Gamers tend to blame AMD and Nvidia for these efforts, viewing them as an attempt to hoodwink gamers into paying for “new” chips that aren’t new at all. According to AMD, that’s not what’s driving this refresh cycle. “There are no hardware differences to non-X [RX 500 GPUs],” an AMD spokesperson told PCWorld. “The Radeon RX 500X series graphics cards is a brand refresh for 2018 OEM platforms that ensures Radeon RX 500 series cards are using the latest ‘Polaris’ architecture-based hardware and driver revisions (Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition) for 2018.”

AMD’s New RX 500X GPUs are OEM Rebrands, Not New Cards

There’s no expectation that the Radeon 500X family will even come to store shelves, but if you should happen to see the odd card for sale here or there, you can just knock the “X” off and read the product as a standard 500-series part. As of this writing, we’re not aware of any near-term AMD plan for a midrange refresh this year — the only public GPU launch on the roadmap the company announced at CES were plans for a 7nm machine learning variant of Vega as a pipecleaner for GF’s 7nm process node later this year. Such a chip would be a very limited run part intended to validate the process rather than a major launch or revenue driver.

Continue reading

AMD’s New Radeon RX 6000 Series Is Optimized to Battle Ampere
AMD’s New Radeon RX 6000 Series Is Optimized to Battle Ampere

AMD unveiled its RX 6000 series today. For the first time since it bought ATI in 2006, there will be some specific advantages to running AMD GPUs in AMD platforms.

Nvidia Will Mimic AMD’s Smart Access Memory on Ampere: Report
Nvidia Will Mimic AMD’s Smart Access Memory on Ampere: Report

AMD's Smart Access Memory hasn't even shipped yet, but Nvidia claims it can duplicate the feature.

AMD’s Retail Market Share Surges Based on European Reseller Data
AMD’s Retail Market Share Surges Based on European Reseller Data

AMD's European channel sales figures continue to be excellent, with a particular surge in November and December 2020.

AMD’s Reliance on TSMC Isn’t Harming the Company’s Growth Prospects
AMD’s Reliance on TSMC Isn’t Harming the Company’s Growth Prospects

It has been difficult to buy high-end PC components for nearly six months. There are a number of reasons for this, including pandemic-related impacts, the related surge in demand for all computing hardware, and supply shortages. A lot of eyeballs have been trained on foundries like TSMC, to the point that national governments have put…