AMD is targeting the mainstream with its new Radeon RX 480 graphics card announced in a livestream from Computex in Taipei.
Ahead of the AMD's Computex 2016 keynote event that has scheduled multiple announcements, the company sent out an e-mail to the press, teasing its first graphics card based on the Polaris architecture. Wall Street Journal reports that the Radeon RX 480 will deliver performance equivalent to what today's $500 graphics cards offer. AMD has unveiled much of its product specifications as well as its availability and price.
The card will hit the market on June 29 and will sell at just $199. According to AnandTech, the RX 480 will include 36 CUs and 2304 SPs. The specific Polaris GPU used in the Radeon RX 480 has not been named by AMD, but tech experts from the same publication assume that this is a Polaris 10 SKU same as seen in Polaris 11, as it is a very small chip better suited for notebooks.
The upcoming Radeon graphics card will offer over 5 TFLOPs of compute performance. It is estimated that the card will work at a GPU clock speed in the range of 1.08GHz to 1.3GHz (6 TFLOPs). If this is true, then the upcoming card would be 10 percent to 30 percent higher clocked, comparable to Radeon 300 series cards.
With one of Polaris major advancements being focused on improving architectural efficiency, it is expected that the RX 480 would provide better performance than R9 390, even at the lower end of clock speed estimates. In terms of memory, the card will come with a 258-bit bus and 8Gbps GDDR5,
AMD has also revealed that in terms of TDP, the RX 480 will be a 150W card. The card will be built on Polaris 14nm FinFET and will consume only a bit more than half the power consumed by R9 390. Its good balance between power consumption and performance will recommend the RX 480 as a mainstream card of choice.
