After months of leaks, teasers, and speculation, AMD has finally launched their new RX 500 series graphics cards. A refresh of the RX 400 series, the new lineup features largely the same Polaris GPUs with the RX 580, RX 570 and RX 560. While Polaris 10 has been tweaked to give us Polaris 20, the only truly new GPU is the Polaris 12 powering the RX 550. In a new listing on their website, it looks like we may be getting another Polaris 12 variant aimed at laptops.
Unlike the rest of the consumer lineup, the RX 540 is an OEM exclusive. Featuring 8 CUs, that gives us a total of 512 stream processors, the same as the RX 550. It also features 16 ROPs and 32 TMUs. This suggests that the card uses the same Polaris 12 GPU. Compared to the RX 550, the core clock is a bit higher at up to 1219 MHz, offering 19.504 GP/s (Pixel Fill Rate), 39.008 GT/s (Texture Fill Rate) and 1.2 TFLOPs of performance.
Despite featuring the same 128bit memory bus and 2GB or 4GB of VRAM, bandwidth down to 96GB/s. This is due to the use of 6 Gbps GDDR5 instead of the 7 Gbps powering the RX 550. This might be a cost saving measure aimed at OEM laptop devices where the monitor resolutions won’t justify high bandwidth. Rounding off the package, we only have Display Port and HDMI outputs which suit the laptop market.
