AMD Polaris 12 Powering RX 550 Spotted Online – 640 Shaders, 4GB VRAM & More
AMD’s smallest-ever Polaris chip, allegedly called the Polaris 12, has shown up in the OpenCL manifest. The new GPU is likely to power the company’s new entry-level Radeon RX 550 rebrand.
AMD Polaris 12 GPU Specs Leak out
AMD Polaris 12 apparently features 10 Compute Units with 64 cores each, for a total of 640 Stream Processors. For reference, the Polaris 11 chip which powers the Radeon RX 460 sports 1024 SPs, though the retail version of the card is locked to 896 shaders. This means the new GPU will have nearly half as many shaders as Polaris 11 does.
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The Polaris 12 would potentially be clocked at 1302MHz boost, with up to 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Other details regarding the memory bandwidth and compute performance are not revealed, but from what we know so far, this is going to be a mobile-friendly, low-power GPU.
If the leaked information is accurate, the Polaris 12 will be aimed towards handling light gaming and multiple high-resolution displays for productivity. It won’t be anything that should excite gamers, but those who are looking for a cheap graphics solution under $100, that could play less visually demanding titles like League of Legends and DOTA 2.
Radeon RX 500 series GPUs to be based on 14nm LPP FinFET
AMD is expected to unleash its Radeon RX 500 series in mid-April. It’s going to be a rebadged graphics family based on the same Polaris architecture as the RX 400 series. The only difference between the two lies in the process: the Radeon RX 500 series cards will be built using the 14nm LPP process compared to the 14nm LPE being utlized by last year’s Polaris cards.
With the new 14nm FinFET LPP on board, the Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 will be rebranded as the Polaris 20, Polaris 21 and Polaris 12 GPUs. The enhance process technology is expected to enable slightly higher clock speeds at lower power consumption.
The Radeon RX 500 series will include the Radeon RX 580, RX 570, RX 560 and RX 550 graphics cards. You can read more about the upcoming Polaris rebrands here.