• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

AMD announces 5500, 5500XT, 5500M Navi cards (7nm and GDDR6)

llien

Member
Today AMD announces a new mid-range solution for desktop and mobile markets. The RX 5500 series will feature three SKUs: the RX 5500M, RX 5500 and RX 5500 XT. Not once, does AMD mention the XT variant in the presentation, yet that’s what the SERIES would indicate.

Throughout the presentation, AMD compares its new graphics card to Radeon RX 480 and GeForce GTX 1650. The RX 5500 is meant to be better than both. In the footnotes, we learn that the card used for this comparison is the RX 5500 4GB. Therefore, we assume that the XT variant will share the specs with a non-XT variant, with an exception of higher memory capacity (8 GB).

The RX 5500 series will be the first Radeon mid-range cards to feature GDDR6 memory. A combination of 8GB G6 and 128-bit bus has never been used in consumer graphics before, but thanks to the higher GDDR6 specs, the maximum theoretical bandwidth will reach 224 GB/s, just 32 Gb/s short of RX 580’s bandwidth.

AMD has not confirmed the Navi variant used by RX 5500 series, but the speculation points towards Navi 14. This is a new chip with a die area of 158 mm2. Thanks to the 7nm fabrication process this should translate into higher power efficiency than the Polaris series (AMD claims the RX 5500 provides 1.6X performance per Watt over RX 480). It’s worth adding that the chip has more transistors than Polaris 10 (6.4B vs 5.7B).

This GPU will sport 1408 Stream Processors (22 Compute Units) for all variants of the RX 5500 series (including the mobile version). The boost clock will be lower than RX 5700’s at 1845 MHz, but the memory speed should be the same (14 Gbps).

AMD promises that RX 5500 series will be available this quarter, but no date was given, neither was the pricing.


PXyMYdL.png


xNpur2s.png


videocardz`

Not clear if it these are 7nm DUV or 7nm EUV .
And yeah, 1650 traditionally sucks.

The benches show why NV is rushing "super" versions of 1650/1660.
 

spons

Gold Member
Thanks for the write up. I'll stick with my RX 580 for the time being. It's power hungry all-right, more so than the similarly-priced 1050 Ti at the time, but it's also much more powerful than that card. Lower-end nvidia never seems to hit the sweet spot in price/performance.

Still, for someone like me primarily gaming on 1080p I'm kinda good for now. Can't crank the settings up in Borderlands 3 to name an example, but it runs perfectly fine on "Medium". I'll most likely skip this gen if this is their mid-range offering.
 

Xyphie

Member
As a laptop chip I think AMD will have a hard time getting design wins unless they sell it for cheap. While it has ~35% higher performance than a 1650 in the desktop configuration that comes with 70% higher power consumption. A TU116 GPU (1660/1660 Super/1660 Ti) will have significantly higher performance in the same power envelope (~50-75% over 1650).
 

Leonidas

Member
Yeah, power consumption doesn't look good.
And the lack of pricing isn't confidence inspiring, maybe they didn't want to be embarrassed by Nvidia refreshes being a better option and backtracking on pricing like they did with the 5700 series.
 
Last edited:

Ascend

Member
As a laptop chip I think AMD will have a hard time getting design wins unless they sell it for cheap. While it has ~35% higher performance than a 1650 in the desktop configuration that comes with 70% higher power consumption. A TU116 GPU (1660/1660 Super/1660 Ti) will have significantly higher performance in the same power envelope (~50-75% over 1650).
Yeah, power consumption doesn't look good.
And the lack of pricing isn't confidence inspiring, maybe they didn't want to be embarrassed by Nvidia refreshes being a better option and backtracking on pricing like they did with the 5700 series.
Where did you see the power benchmarks?
 

Ascend

Member
AMD spec sheet says 110W board power for the 4GB version.
And how does that constitute 70% higher power consumption? If it was 70%, the 5500 would need to use more than 125W in a desktop to desktop comparison. It's more in the 50% range, although that's still more, 30% more performance for 50% more power is not nearly as bad as 30% more performance for 70% more power.

Or did you get the 70% by comparing mobile 1650 to desktop 5500..? That is not a fair comparison either. There are reports of the 5500 mobile using 85W, although I'm not sure if that's correct or not.


Oh. Now I get it. You were comparing the 50W 1650 mobile to the 85W of the 5500 Mobile. Now your post makes sense.
 

PhoenixTank

Member
Last edited:
Today AMD announces a new mid-range solution for desktop and mobile markets. The RX 5500 series will feature three SKUs: the RX 5500M, RX 5500 and RX 5500 XT. Not once, does AMD mention the XT variant in the presentation, yet that’s what the SERIES would indicate.

Throughout the presentation, AMD compares its new graphics card to Radeon RX 480 and GeForce GTX 1650. The RX 5500 is meant to be better than both. In the footnotes, we learn that the card used for this comparison is the RX 5500 4GB. Therefore, we assume that the XT variant will share the specs with a non-XT variant, with an exception of higher memory capacity (8 GB).

The RX 5500 series will be the first Radeon mid-range cards to feature GDDR6 memory. A combination of 8GB G6 and 128-bit bus has never been used in consumer graphics before, but thanks to the higher GDDR6 specs, the maximum theoretical bandwidth will reach 224 GB/s, just 32 Gb/s short of RX 580’s bandwidth.

AMD has not confirmed the Navi variant used by RX 5500 series, but the speculation points towards Navi 14. This is a new chip with a die area of 158 mm2. Thanks to the 7nm fabrication process this should translate into higher power efficiency than the Polaris series (AMD claims the RX 5500 provides 1.6X performance per Watt over RX 480). It’s worth adding that the chip has more transistors than Polaris 10 (6.4B vs 5.7B).

This GPU will sport 1408 Stream Processors (22 Compute Units) for all variants of the RX 5500 series (including the mobile version). The boost clock will be lower than RX 5700’s at 1845 MHz, but the memory speed should be the same (14 Gbps).

AMD promises that RX 5500 series will be available this quarter, but no date was given, neither was the pricing.


PXyMYdL.png


xNpur2s.png


videocardz`

Not clear if it these are 7nm DUV or 7nm EUV .
And yeah, 1650 traditionally sucks.

The benches show why NV is rushing "super" versions of 1650/1660.

I'm willing to bet that these are "standard" 7nm parts, no EUV. Reasons for that being:

- 7nm is still ramping, too early for volume 7nm+ part, especially a relatively large (compared to mobile) relatively low margin (compared to high end GPU) part
- 7nm+ isn't a direct shrink, and it seems unlikely AMD would either be able to or want to move on so quickly
- die area doesn't indicate a significant density improvement over 5700 series - it's a little over 60% of the area for about 60% of the transistors

I think Zen 2 APUs are likely to be current gen 7nm also as Zen 2 and RDNA 1 are based around this node. Next gen consoles might not even be EUV either due to generation of architectures involved and the sheer volume of very large chips needed to be in production by June/July 2020.
 
Is AMD finally going to release a decent low profile GPU for God's sake? These bottom tier cards seem perfect for a LP form factor but AMD has been sorely behind in this area for years. nVidia hasn't been much better lately with the 1650 LP basically being vaporware. But at least the 1050 Ti LP has been a real thing for a while now and not too hard to find. With SFF builds all the rage for quite some time now it boggles the mind that both companies aren't pushing 75W LP options a little more. I really haven't wanted or needed a full size ATX machine in years....
 
Top Bottom