AMD Rebrands RX 500 Series GPUs As RX 500X Series

By Leon Chan
published

AMD posted specs for a full line of RX 500X series of GPUs that appear to be straight-up rebrands of the existing RX 500 series.

Earlier this week, rumors of what could have been AMD’s first consumer GPU announcement in 2018 began circulating when members of Reddit found a placeholder page on AMD’s website for an RX 500X series. Shortly after, one GPU of that lineup, the mobile RX 560X, was spotted on the 3DMark database. A new version of AIDA64 and AMD’s official website now confirm the existence of a full line of RX 500X series GPUs. Unfortunately, official specs highly suggest that these cards are nothing but straight-up rebrands of the current RX 500 series that launched in April 2017, which were themselves merely a slightly updated version of the RX 400 series of 2016.

The rebadging, as we know it, consists of the RX 580X, RX 570X, RX 560X , RX 550X, and RX 540X. Going through the specs reveals they are spec-for-spec identical to their non-X counterparts. If there is any notable differences, then it’s in the supported technologies list. For example, the RX 580X lacks mention of Crossfire, frame-rate target control, and Eyefinity, among others. AMD may have chosen to rebrand some of its technologies and lump them into a more general term, but we don’t suspect that the RX 500X series will actually have any feature differences with the RX 500 series. One notable exception is the RX 550X, which is now listed with 8 and 10 CU versions. The RX 550 launched with an 8 CU variant only, but a 10 CU variant was launched by Sapphire earlier this year.

AMD has yet to make an official announcement for the RX 500X series, and we don’t know if it will. As AnandTech points out, the RX 500X series could be exclusively for system OEMs. Of course, rebranding/rebadging of GPUs is nothing new in the industry. AMD was well known for relying on that tactic when the company was going through arguably darker times, at least on the CPU front, a few years ago. The HD 7970 was refreshed multiple times--once as the GHZ Edition, again as the OEM-only HD 8970, then again as the R9 280X. The flagship of the R9 series, the R9 290X, itself was refreshed as the R9 390X.

Expect to see RX 500X series graphics cards appearing in systems from OEMs in the near future. The rebranding doesn’t preclude an announcement for an actually new consumer GPU from AMD this year, but there is no evidence it will occur. AMD’s CES 2018 announcement mentioned a 7nm Vega variant for AI applications, but previous plans we heard of transitioning Vega to 12nm in consumer GPUs haven’t panned out. The Red team’s big boss of consumer GPUs, Raja Koduri left and joined Intel in late 2017. The move was probably unrelated to the 14nm Vega chip that graces Intel’s Kaby Lake-G, which is the only thing that we’ve seen from AMD in 2018 so far. Kaby Lake-G as a product might only a hedge by AMD and Intel against the quickly rising Nvidia. The latter didn’t launch a new GPU architecture yet, as some had expected, but we’re certain that it’s fully ready to do so.

Leon Chan
Topics
AMD
GPUs
Graphics
25 Comments Comment from the forums
  • redgarl
    OEM
    Reply
  • Martell1977
    It's possible that these will be mobile variants or the 12nm change over products.

    If it is a straight up naming change, this would be nothing new, both AMD and nVidia have done this, as well as the OEM only series. How many generations did the GeForce 8800 live on? 3? 4? I do want to mention though that the 290x to 390x and other GPU's were not a straight up rebrands, there were memory, clock speed and a few other changes made. It wasn't ground breaking changes, but going from 4gb VRAM to 8gb was a good move.

    Rebrands are just placeholders until delayed products are ready for the market. Maybe they decided to forgo the 12nm and make the jump straight to 7nm. Maybe an indication that 7nm is closer to being ready than we thought? So much to speculate about here.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    I suppose it was inevitable in today's market that AMD (and probably Nvidia soon) would re-brand last-gen tech as a hollow excuse to raise MSRP. But it is still disappointing that AMD hasn't finished fleshing out their Vega line, and possibly never will.

    Were the Rx 400 series actually new cards? I knew Rx 500 used to be Rx 400, and I guess I just assumed Rx 400 was a re-brand of Rx 300 (which was a re-brand of Rx 200,which was itself mostly a re-brand etc. ). That is why I am so disappointed in the lack of new Vega cards, because I for sure knew those weren't re-brands of 5 year old tech.
    Reply
  • ern88
    AMD should call its rebadges the rebrandeon edition. But nope all AMD does is give some slight boost of the clock and roll it out to some unsuspecting consumer and call it a day.
    Reply
  • spdragoo
    20877007 said:
    I suppose it was inevitable in today's market that AMD (and probably Nvidia soon) would re-brand last-gen tech as a hollow excuse to raise MSRP. But it is still disappointing that AMD hasn't finished fleshing out their Vega line, and possibly never will.

    Were the Rx 400 series actually new cards? I knew Rx 500 used to be Rx 400, and I guess I just assumed Rx 400 was a re-brand of Rx 300 (which was a re-brand of Rx 200,which was itself mostly a re-brand etc. ). That is why I am so disappointed in the lack of new Vega cards, because I for sure knew those weren't re-brands of 5 year old tech.

    It depends on the cards:
    ■ The R5/R7 400 series were technically rebrands of the similarly-numbered R5/R7 300 series cards (although they managed to drop their TDPs by about 33%), but the 400s were all OEM models
    ■ The RX 455 was a rebranded R7/R9 360, but was again only an OEM model
    ■ The RX 460/470/480 were brand-new models, using 4th-gen GCN processors
    ■ RX 520 was a rebranded R5 430 (OEM exclusive), although it dropped from 8 to 4 ROUs
    ■ RX 530 is a weird OEM model (possibly for laptops?), appears almost as if someone took 1/4th of the R9 380X's processors & dropped the memory down to 25%/50% (with the laptop models using the onboard DDR3 instead of their own GDDR5), plus the GDDR5 models cut the bus width in half.
    ■ RX 560/570/580 are rebranded RX 460/470/480 models with slightly higher clocks (& slightly higher TDPs).
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    20876890 said:
    If it is a straight up naming change, this would be nothing new, both AMD and nVidia have done this, as well as the OEM only series.
    The thing, is although rebrands are common, they usually come with increased clock speeds/VRAM/etc., or are renamed further down the product stack (e.g. high-end flagship HD 7970 becomes med-high R9 280X). I can't think of any recent examples of a card being rebadged and keeping the exact same specs and same place in the product stack (and therefore possibly the same MSRP).
    Reply
  • none12345
    Seems like a waste of time to me. Same card same clocks, no need for a new name, but whatever.

    At least its not like 2 versions of the nvidia 1030 where ram(ddr4 vs gddr5), and clock speeds are quite different. Thats just retarded. Hell if nvidia called it a 1030 and a 1030x no one would care. But as its 2 different products under the same name its straight BS.


    Rant over....someone wake me up when the 7nm cards come out. Otherwise the gpu market has pissed me off so much over the last year and a half that even tho i really want a gpu, i just refuse to pay anything right now for 2016 era chips(well i guess id buy a 1070 or a vega 56 if it was $150, otherwise this old stuff can just screw off).
    Reply
  • monsta
    Yay for 3rd rebrand of the RX400!
    Reply
  • bennie101
    And every other company in this world does about the same thing I can mention many Intel for 1 how but apple and there phones slight tweaks and such we got a new product.Even Nivida Has done it as well its just business is all it is up to the comsumer to research a product before they buy it if they dont well thats on them.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    The rebranding doesn’t preclude an announcement for an actually new consumer GPU from AMD this year, but there is no evidence it will occur.
    We know there will be at least one more Vega, this year. Vega 56 & 64 were internally named Vega 10, and Linux driver support was just added for Vega 12. I don't know if Vega 11 is supposed to be the 24 CU chip that sold as Vega M for integration into Intel's Core i7-8xxxG series, the Vega Mobile GPU, or if it's yet something else.
    Reply