The upcoming AMD Radeon RX 490 is said to be Vega-based. (Photo : YouTube/AdoredTV)
The rumored AMD Radeon RX 500 GPU series appears to have been confirmed by the Radeon RX 560M that will be part of the Lenovo Y520 notebook package. However, it remains to be seen if the mobile graphics card is Polaris or Vega 10.
The Lenovo Y520 actually supports both the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and Radeon RX 560M graphics chips as listed by the computer maker but it is the latter piques the interest. Essentially, Lenovo confirmed what AMD would like to keep under wraps for now - that the RX 500 GPU series really exists, WCCFTech reported.
But with the revelation, it seems possible that for the RX 500 GPU AMD plans to deploy cards in the series that will be on Polaris or Vega 10 architecture. As pointed out in the same report, there are indications that the RX 560M is but a rebrand of the RX 460M that was issued last year.
One solid proof is that both the 560M and 460M are with 4GB VRAM, and there is this likelihood that that the former will rock the same full 1024 SP configuration, that according to WCCFTech was seen before with the MacBook.
The same report is likewise convinced that RX 560M is not a Vega 10 GPU but more of the Polaris 12 kind that AMD will release soon. The family of chip is thought to boast of faster performance and better efficiency, the report added.
This leads to the speculation that AMD will power its upcoming RX 500 series with both the Polaris and Vega GPU platforms. But it is the latter that is likely to flex the graphics muscle to compete with AMD's chief rival - NVIDIA.
Reports said the Radeon RX 500 will unbox both in HBM2 and GDDR/X editions, and that would mean significant jump in memory bandwidth or up to 512GBPS. Leaked benchmark results have so far indicated that the new card series will be available in 8GB and 16GB variants.
And with the use of the Instinct MI25 Accelerator, the RX 500 is said to be capable of 12.5TFLOPs peak computing performance in single precision mode or 6.25TFLOPs in double-precision. With such GPU might, the card series is seen to be a strong challenger to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080.
As for the pricing, the AMD Radeon RX 500, whether on dual Polaris or Vega 10 GPU is expected to retail at a lower price point than that of the of GTX 1080, which sells for $600 apiece.
