The AMD Radeon RX 500 release date is reportedly set April 18 at the earliest and as the day approaches more juicy details on the new graphics card series have emerged. The latest information suggested the RX 500 cards will run on Polaris GPU architecture rebadged.
To be clear, RX 500 is not part of the Radeon RX Vega cards that according to WCCFTech will not come out until May or June this 2017. The latter is the immediate sequel to AMD's RX 400 and will boast of enhanced Polaris GPU technology, the report added.
But RX 500 on Polaris is somehow getting a rebrand. From Polaris 10 and 11, as mentioned in earlier reports, the cards will run on Polaris 20 XTX, which will be true for the flagship RX 580 card, and Polaris 21, which applies for the RX 560.
There will be an RX 570 too that presumably will be on Polaris 20 XTX but with slightly lower specs on clock speed and VRAM provisions. While the RX 580 will boast of 2304MHz boosted clock and 8GB memory with speed of 8GHz, the RX 570 will clock at top speed of only 2048MHz with 4GB RAM that processes at top speed of 7GHz.
Also part of the lineup is the RX 550, which according to the same report is a Polaris 12 GPU and is in line with earlier leaked specifications. But for the most part, details on the card, which is expected to sell for under $100, remain on "to be announced status."
WCCFTech said that to differentiate the RX 500 from the RX 400, AMD made use of the 14-nanometer FinFET LPP technology as opposed to the latter's 14nm LPE. LPP stands for "Enhanced version with higher performance and lower power; a full platform offering with MPW, IP enablement and wide application coverage," the report added.
And among the most notable improvements from LPE to LPP are significant clock speed gains and increased power efficiency.
In an earlier report, WCCFTech said release date of the RX 500 cards will happen on April 18 or shortly after the scheduled AMD Ryzen 5 CPU debut in the same month. As mentioned, price will start below $100 and will go up no more than $200 for the high-end of the bunch - the Radeon RX 580.