AMD is on a spree of giving us surprises this year with their new processor lineup launched earlier this year and now it’s the RX 500 series. They are not based on the highly-anticipated Vega architecture but come based on Polaris architecture.
They will be replacing the last year’s RX 400 lineup which was also based on the Polaris architecture. As AMD says, the graphics processors come with a revised Polaris architecture to offer slightly better clock speeds using the third-gen 14nm FinFET LPP process technology.
Spec wise, both the RX 480 and this year’s RX 580 are quite identical. One of the few differences they have is their boost clock speed with 1340 MHz of the RX 580 and 1266 MHz of RX 480. The TBP has been increased to 185W and the new dual-fan reference card now has a new board that comes with a single 8-pin power connector.
The lower end RX 570 saw a change in its memory clock speed, which has been increased to 7 Gbps from 6.6 Gbps, unlike the RX 580 that stuck at 8Gbps. The RX 570 has also seen a major bump in the base clock speed from 926 MHz to 1168 MHz.
AMD RX 560 has full Polaris 11, while the RX 550 has cut-down Polaris 12. The former has also seen a slight bump in its base clock that has been increased from 1090 MHz to 1175 MHz. Whereas, the RX 550 is designed for the users who want a little more muscle power than the integrated graphics. It comes with eight compute units compared to sixteen in the RX 560 and has a boost clock speed of 1183 MHz.
PC World notes that the RX 570 and RX 580 will go on sale starting today. The 4GB Radeon RX 570 will be priced at $170, while the RX 580 will start at $200 for the 4GB variant. The 8GB variant of the RX 580 will be priced at $230. The RX 550 will sport a price tag of $80 and will retail starting April 20, whereas the RX 560 will retail starting May for a price of $100.