AMD has quietly highlighted some new graphics processors (GPUs), but before you get too excited, these are older generation models – certainly not Navi – and they’re graphics solutions which are aimed at system builders (as opposed to being on shelves for consumers to buy).
These new offerings are the AMD Radeon 600 Series, which we heard whispers about back in May, and the GPUs now appear to be ready to roll, or at least present on AMD’s website (at the time of writing), as spotted by German website PC Games Hardware.
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The family is headed up by the previously rumored Radeon RX 640, plus the Radeon 630, 625, 620 and 610. These are neither Navi nor Vega, but rather Polaris-based (GCN 4.0) GPUs, with the majority aimed at laptops, although the top two models are for both desktop PCs and notebooks.
All of them, as mentioned, are intended for OEM, or original equipment manufacturer, usage. In other words, they will be supplied to PC and laptop manufacturers for use in their own builds.
AMD has detailed the GPU specifications on its site, and the Radeon RX 640 runs with 640 stream processors, 40 texture mapping units (TMUs), 16 raster operation pipelines (ROPs), and 4GB of GDDR5 video memory.
There is also a weaker spin, the RX 630, which drops to 512 stream processors, as was the case with the RX 550 previously (which had 32 TMUs, and 16 ROPs).
Bandwidth blues
Aside from the relatively aged architecture here, there’s another disappointment in the 64-bit memory interface which gives a maximum memory bandwidth of 56GB/s, considerably slower than the RX 550 which sported a 128-bit interface for 112GB/s bandwidth.
The Radeon 630 has 512 stream processors, 32 TMUs, and eight ROPs, with all the GPUs coming with a 64-bit interface and 4GB of video RAM.
PC Games Hardware further draws parallels with AMD’s Oland GPUs and the new lower-end Radeon 620 and 610, with Oland tech dating back to 2013 (GCN 1.0), believe it or not.
At any rate, the upshot is the Radeon 600 series is an unexciting rebrand, essentially, but will hopefully be priced so as to attract OEMs to incorporate it as a discrete option in very affordable builds, and therein will lie the appeal.
AMD has indicated a third quarter launch for these GPUs, so their availability should be imminent, and systems carrying these products should therefore be arriving in the relatively near future.
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Via Hexus
