HIGHLIGHTS
- The references were not deeply hidden in the Radeon driver update
- AMD has not announced any future roadmap for the Polaris architecture
- The new GPUs might be minor refreshes of the Radeon RX 500 series
AMD has a busy time ahead of it with multiple launches scheduled for the rest of this year, most notably its 7nm Ryzen 3000 series consumer CPUs, Epyc server CPUs, and Navi-based Radeon graphics cards. Now it appears that the company might have another little surprise in store with a new series of Radeon graphics cards based on the existing Polaris architecture. Multiple references to a purported Radeon RX 640 and Radeon RX 630 have been spotted in the latest Radeon graphics driver, the Adrenalin 2019 Edition version 19.4.3, which is an optional update. This could mean that AMD is planning to launch an update to the current Radeon RX 500 series to serve the low end of the market while Navi-based GPUs address the high end.
The references to the unannounced Radeon RX 640 and Radeon RX 630 appear to share device identifiers with the existing Radeon RX 550X and laptop-only Radeon RX 540X respectively, indicating that the new devices could be very minor refreshes or even rebadged GPUs, which would not be unprecedented. Tom’s Hardware cites a post on the TechPowerUp forum, in which a user spotted the references to these new GPU names.
It is possible that AMD will use a refined manufacturing process or slightly increase the performance of these parts, justifying their new names. The Radeon RX 600 series could also be produced solely for OEM PCs or laptops, or be limited to some regions of the world rather than going into retail globally. Given the low-end positioning, these would be entry-level parts that sit below the existing Radeon RX 570, Radeon RX 580 and Radeon RX 590.
There are no indications yet that AMD is planning a similar move with the higher-end Radeon RX 500 series models. However, as we saw in our review of Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1660 and GeForce GTX 1650, AMD’s older GPUs can still be competitive if they are priced right.
AMD is believed to be preparing its first wave of Navi-based GPUs to be sold as the Radeon RX 3000 series, which would position them against Nvidia’s current GeForce RTX 2000 series. These GPUs will launch later this year. However, AMD could announce them or at least release some teasers as soon as the Computex 2019 trade show, set to be held in the last week of May.
Source: gadgets.ndtv.com
