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
And RX 480 is faster than 1060, if you compare non-throttling custom cards to custom GTX 1060. Ref AMD cards are just bad, some exceptions confirm the rule.
That's why you actually shouldn't use TPU benchmarks. (show me improvement listed below on TPU site)
DX11
On release (July 2016), the GTX1060 was around 12% and 8% better than RX480 in 1080P and 1440P. Now (Dec 2016), the GTX1060 is 2% and 0% better than RX480 in 1080P and 1440P.
DX12
On release (July 2016), the GTX1060 was around 3% and 4% worse than RX480 in 1080P and 1440P. Now (Dec 2016), the GTX1060 is 6% and 6% worse than RX480 in 1080P and 1440P.
www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/73945-gtx-1060-vs-rx-480-updated-review.html
So no, not really.
And all that ignoring huge adaptive sync premium on nvidia compatible monitors.
95W is wrong anyway, RX 480 drew a few watts more than 150 (the TDP of the card), RX 470 and 460 did their jobs as intended.
It also still isn't fixed the band aid still pulls the absolute max of spec. That is no good for xfire setups or older boards.
It pulls the max of spec? Last time I checked, the "maximum of spec" wasn't too much. Also it's _not_ pulling the maximum of spec, it's pulling about 10-15 W less after the update through driver. So it's good for everything, otherwise give me hard facts, examples of systems that blew AFTER the fix.
I also read, pulling *more than spec* is no problem on modern mainboards (as long as it's only 5-10 W), say mainboards not older than 8 to 10 years. You're really making something out of nothing.
Good news is they have already released an RX480 embedded solution that consumes 95w TDP for the entire board to include the memory and at full desktop GPU speed. That is again what gives further food to this fire. Yet again AMD was horribly let down by GloFo and is forced to release something that is nowhere near what they bragged about in the press. This is bad for EVERYONE.
Also some food for thought for you. Would you consider the Gigabyte X99M-gaming 5 to be a modern motherboard? Two different boards with two different brands sets of 480's and neither could run crossfire at stock settings stable. Mind you these were in two completely different machines with different power supplies, processors, ram, SSD etc. Same exact over drawn issue. Luckily modern boards just shut off instead of catching on fire like the ones of old do. This problem was with the drivers released in 2017 so it is post power fix. The problem still exists, the driver fix was nothing more than a bandaid. Remember they were drawing 6.7A off of the 12v rail which exceeds the 5.5A spec. After 16.7.1 they draw 5.6A off of the 12v rail of the motherboard which...drum roll please....STILL EXCEEDS SPEC.
The card design literally looks like it should draw 95, cooler is barely adequate at 150w, absolutely excellent at 95w however. With the powerplan of the reference card that puts 47w off of the mobo and 47w off of the PCI-e 6 pin. Both of those numbers are normal and well within spec. This yet again points towards a card that should have been 95w and was designed to be 95w, but GloFo failed to deliver yields that were that efficient and we got what we got.
Take your freaking blinders off.
Still the GPU works for most users, you have to admit that.