Items tagged with polaris
AMD has had a fairly sizable hole in its graphics card line-up for quite some time now. Disregarding the craziness crypto-miners caused for a while there, pricing on the Radeon RX 580 has hovered around the $200 mark, whereas most of the Radeon RX Vega 56 cards currently available sell for over $400 – give or take a few bucks. In addition, there have been no current-gen offerings released in between the two. Fortunately, AMD hopes to address this situation today, however, with the launch of a semi-new GPU, the not-so-secret Radeon RX 590. Over the last few weeks, news of the Radeon RX 590 has steadily leaked out to the web. We’ve covered a number of the stories on the news page, but...
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Brace yourself, Radeon RX 590 graphics cards are coming. There is zero doubt about that at this point, even though AMD's upcoming Polaris refresh is still not official. It will be soon, and in the meantime, we're seeing more and more related leaks. The latest one is a set of press images depicting Sapphire's Radeon RX 590 Nitro+ Special Edition graphics card. Image Source: Videocardz Looking at the images, it appears Sapphire is recycling the same custom "Dual-X" cooler that's found on its other Nitro+ cards, such as the Radeon RX 580 Nitro+, but in a different color—it's blue this time around. "The Dual-X cooler featured in the latest Sapphire Nitro+ RX 500 Series cards is an all-new design....
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AMD is on the cusp of releasing yet another Radeon RX graphics card model based on its Polaris architecture, essentially a refresh with presumably faster clockspeeds and, as a result, improved performance. Will there be anything else to note? Probably not, unless AMD has something under its sleeve that has not yet been leaked. At this point, Polaris has been around the block a time or two. Unless AMD deviates from its roadmap (unlikely), Navi will be the next major GPU design upgrade out of Sunnyvale. In the meantime, AMD is squeezing as much life out of Polaris as it can, as it's still a capable architecture for the lucrative mid-range and entry-level markets. Polaris will make another introduction...
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If we owned a farm, we'd strongly considering betting it on AMD and its hardware partners releasing a Radeon RX 590 with an upgraded Polaris GPU underneath the hood. The clues are there, including a leaked press render of a PowerColor card. If that is not enough, however, there are now photos floating around of an actual retail box, complete with some specs. Source: Twitter via Andreas Schilling The Radeon RX 590 is yet another refresh to Polaris as AMD works on a die shrink for Vega and its 7nm Navi architecture. Polaris 30, as we and others have been calling it, is built on a 12-nanometer FinFET manufacturing process. The assumption is that it will deliver faster clockspeeds and better power...
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It now seems like a foregone conclusion that AMD and its hardware partners will be rolling out a new Radeon RX 590 model based on a refreshed Polaris GPU. Following rumors that ASUS is prepping a Radeon RX 590 ROG Strix graphics card, a purported press render of a PowerColor Radeon RX 590 Red Devil has found its way to the web. PowerColor's card looks the same as its Radeon RX 580 Red Devil Golden Sample. There are two cooling fans sitting atop a chunky cooler. It takes up three expansion slots, so buyers who are interested in this card will have to make sure they have the necessary room inside their case. Other than that, we don't have any details on specs. Past leaks and rumors point to the...
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AMD seems to be focusing on squeezing as much out of its Polaris architecture as possible while we wait for Navi to arrive. There have already been several generations of Polaris parts, including the Radeon RX 400 series, Radeon RX 500 series, and a refreshed release of the latter. Now there is chatter of a Radeon RX 590 model being around the bend. A Radeon RX 590 would be an interesting wrinkle to the Polaris lineup, given that it's recently been rumored AMD would launch 12nm Polaris 30 GPUs. As the rumor goes, Polaris 30 would be used in upcoming Radeon RX 680 and Radeon RX 670 models. None of this has been announced, of course, but we can certainly envision AMD stretching out its Polaris...
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MSI is rolling out a new Mech 2 line of Radeon RX graphics cards with AMD's Polaris GPUs underneath the hood, as part of its newly formed Mech series. Normally a new gaming brand wouldn't warranty much attention, but it's notable here because of all the drama surrounding NVIDIA's recently retired GeForce Partner Program (GPP), and the events that have unfolded since the controversial affiliate program was first announced. To quickly recap, NVIDIA created an affiliate program in which it would provide additional marketing support and other perks to its hardware partners in exchange for carrying a gaming brand exclusive for GeForce products. The program drew anti-competitive concerns, including...
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In case anyone has forgotten about Polaris, the GPU architecture behind AMD's Radeon RX 400 and Radeon RX 500 series of graphics cards, the company has gone and launched a new Radeon RX 500X series that is also based on Polaris. All that is really 'new' about them, however, is the branding—underneath the hood, the hardware is the same, essentially making these rebranded cards. This is not an unusual move, though perhaps disappointing given that Vega is the newer and more interesting GPU architecture at this point. The Radeon RX 500X also represents the third round of Polaris, only this time it does not appear that AMD has made any architectural optimizations. According to AMD, the rebranded...
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Later this month, AMD is expected to announce a refresh to its Polaris graphics card lineup, known as the Radeon RX 500X series. Ahead of the official launch, some details have been leaked to the web, including a set of specs for one of the upcoming cards on Futuremark's 3DMark benchmark database. AMD also updated its website with a few empty placeholders for a few of the unannounced cards. A user on Reddit spotted the listings on AMD's website, which include spots for the Radeon RX 580X, Radeon RX 570X, two separate Radeon RX 560X spots (here and here), and a Radeon RX 550X. Why the two listings for the Radeon RX 560X? Our best guess is that there will be two different versions, perhaps one...
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Microsoft is set to launch a new version of Windows 10 that will ditch all legacy features and components that can be eliminated. The modernized version of Windows 10 will be built on Windows Core OS (WCOS) and is code-named Polaris. The new OS will be aimed specifically at traditional form factor devices like notebooks, desktops, and 2-in-1 computers. The goal of the new flavor of Windows 10 is to leave behind legacy components that are in the current form of Windows 10, to create an operating system that is lighter weight with improved performance and battery life for mobile device. The OS will feature CShell, the coming universal shell that is shared across all devices, but the...
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AMD has a new graphics card on deck to handle rigorous workloads, and the company is billing it as the world’s first dual-GPU aimed at the professional market. The Radeon Pro Duo features dual Polaris GPUs and according to AMD makes a perfect fit for “media and entertainment, broadcast, and design and manufacturing workflows”. The Radeon Pro Duo is in essence two Radeon Pro WX 7100 GPUs (5.7 TFLOPS) incorporated into a single board. As you might expect, combined performance scales nicely to 11.45 TFLOPS. And instead of just 8GB of GDDR5 RAM onboard (as you would find with the Radeon Pro WX 7100), the new Radeon Pro Duo drops the hammer with 32GB of GDDR5. Whereas a single Radeon Pro WX 7100 draws...
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AMD does not really have a competitive solution to NVIDIA's fastest Pascal parts, namely the GeForce GTX 1070 and up. That will change once AMD launches Vega, its next generation GPU architecture, but in the meantime the Sunnyvale outfit just finished refreshing Polaris with what are essentially faster clocked versions of its Radeon RX 400 series (see our review of the Radeon RX 570 and 580). While AMD isn't yet competing at the top end of the spectrum, over on the other side is a compelling sub-$100 upgrade, the new Radeon RX 550. The Radeon RX 550 is not going to break any benchmark records, but at a street price of around $90 for a model with 2GB of GDDR5 memory and $98 for 4GB, it is an interesting...
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In preparation for the impending launch of AMD's next-generation Vega GPU architecture, which will eventually reside at the top of the company's graphics product stack, AMD is refreshing its mainstream graphics card line-up with some more-powerful Polaris-based offerings. In time, the new Radeon RX 580, RX 570, RX 560, and RX 550 cards launching today will supplant all of the current-generation Radeon RX 400-series cards, though these new cards are not radically different from their predecessors. Their clocks, shader counts, and memory configurations have been tweaked, but they’re still based on the same Polaris architecture and offer similar feature sets. The MSI Radeon RX 570 and Radeon RX...
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It has been rumored that AMD's next-gen mainstream GPUs, the RX 500 series, would be launching during the middle of April. But despite the fact that April is right around the corner, few real specifics have leaked out thus far. That changes a bit today, as we now learn that the entire RX 500 stack will make use of varying versions of next-gen Polaris GPU architecture. The top-end RX 580, which will replace the first-gen Polaris-based RX 480, would be based on Polaris 20 XTX. If that "XTX" sounds familiar, it is because AMD previously released GPUs under that moniker, including the X1950 XTX from over a decade ago. Some other cards have had XTX in their code name, like the 2013-era R7 260X built...
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AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100, 5100 And 4100 Series Workstation Graphics Review: Polaris Goes Pro [Updated]
Update 12/20/2016 - This article has been updated with AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100 benchmarks and information. The Radeon Pro WX 7100 is currently the highest-end card in AMD's Pro WX series line-up. AMD initially unveiled the Polaris-based Radeon Pro WX-series of professional workstation graphics cards all the way back in July at SIGGRAPH. Along with the initial announcement, AMD also disclosed that all of the cards would be built and sold by AMD exclusively, that the cards would carry 10-year warranties, and be backed by 24/7 VIP support. The FirePro brand would eventually be phased out as well, with the Radeon Pro moniker taking over as the company's pro graphics branding. Radeon Pro...
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AMD is announcing a new series of Radeon-branded products today, targeted at machine intelligence (AI) and deep learning enterprise applications, called Radeon Instinct. As its name suggests, the new Radeon Instinct line of products are comprised of GPU-based solutions for deep learning, inference, and training. The new GPUs are also complemented by a free, open-source library and framework for GPU accelerators, dubbed MIOpen. MIOpen is architected for high-performance machine intelligence applications, and is optimized for the deep learning frameworks in AMD’s ROCm software suite, which we recently talked about here. During a recent visit with AMD, it was noted that we generate roughly...
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For those of you that have been keeping up with AMD’s Boltzmann Initiative, the company has been moving at a rapid clip to overhaul its HPC software stack for use with its GPUs. AMD's solution not only compares favorably with NVIDIA's CUDA, but developers can also reuse much of its code base (up to 90 percent according to AMD). When AMD initially launched the Boltzmann Initiative late last year, it had these three goals in mind: New Linux Driver and Runtime Stack optimized for HPC & Ultra-scale class computing, Heterogeneous C and C++ compiler which best address the whole system not just a single device HIP acknowledging the need for platform choice when utilizing GPU computing API Since...
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Over the summer, AMD announced that it was extending Polaris architecture into the professional market, for those who require CAD and 3D modeling workhorses, with the Radeon Pro WX Series. Today, AMD has revealed finalized specifications for the Radeon Pro WX Series along with pricing and availability. When the professional graphics cards were first announced in late July, AMD was targeting performance of greater than 2 TFLOPs, 4 TFLOPs, and 5 TFLOPs for the Radeon Pro WX 4100, WX 5100, and WX 7100 respectively. Now that the official specs are out, we’re seeing that AMD was able to hit its mark on two out of the three cards: Radeon Pro WX 4100: 16 compute units / 2.4 TFLOPs / 4GB memory / 128-bit...
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Manufacturers are increasingly putting incredibly potent GPUs into smaller enclosures, as witnessed by gaming notebooks from Razer and Alienware. But that trend is also extending to small form-factor PCs as well, with Zotac announcing the first mini gaming PC with AMD Polaris courtesy of an AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card with 4GB GDDR5 memory: the MAGNUS ERX480. In addition to the virtual reality prowess made possible by the Radeon RX 480, the machine of course supports native 4K display output and can handle up to four displays at once. The processor at center stage is a quad-core Intel Skylake-based Core i5-6400T which operates at 2.2GHz and can Turbo Boost up to 2.8GHz. The MAGNUS ERX480...
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AMD chose to partner up with Apple on the launch of its power-efficient Radeon Pro 400 Series GPUs, which came shortly after the unveiling of new MacBook Pro laptops. It is the 15-inch MacBook Pro that has Polaris inside (Radeon Pro 450 or 455, depending on the model), a point AMD drives home multiple times in its press release the new Polaris parts. "We couldn’t be more proud to have Radeon Pro 400 Series Graphics launching in the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, a notebook designed for performance and creativity," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. "Today there are millions of professional creators and designers, and a billion more who aspire...
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AMD made quite a splash in the GPU market with its Polaris-based mainstream graphics cards. The most popular of the cards, the Radeon RX 480, can be had for as little as $250 in 8GB trim and AMD claims it offers excellent “Beyond HD Gaming and a Premium VR Experience”. Given our benchmark analysis of the GPU, AMD has definitely delivered. After further extending the architecture to the workstation market with the Radeon Pro WX Series, AMD is now branching Polaris out into the embedded market with the Radeon E9260 and E9550. AMD sees these graphics cards being used in “power constrained” environments including casino gaming machines, digital whiteboards, medical imaging and transportation...
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AMD and NVIDIA have been launching graphics cards at a rapid clip this summer. In the last three months or so, about ten new desktop GPUs have been launched or announced, targeting virtually all market segments. Thanks to new architectures and more advanced manufacturing processes, this latest generation of GPUs offer far better performance and efficiency than the previous-gen, with much smaller die sizes too. So it makes sense that the big two discrete GPU makers wanted their latest wares on store shelves ASAP. Today, AMD is ready with an entry-level graphics card featuring its Polaris architecture, the Radeon RX 460. Unlike the Radeon RX 480 and RX 470, the RX 460 is built around a new piece...
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