AMD Quietly Announces First Radeon 300 Series Cards

AMD had a low-key press event announce the first new graphics cards that are part of the Radeon 300 series. These are both desktop and mobile versions, but as you can guess these cards are simply rebrands of current cards rather than actual new graphics cards. OEM manufactures need reasons to push their systems to rebranding and offering a new “Radeon 300 Series Card” with the system is a good way to do that.

AMD-Radeon-M300-slide

Starting on the mobile side we have the R9 M375, R7 M360, and R5 M330. AMD did not specifically say which GPU these cards are using, but based on their specifications we can see they are rebrands of the R9 M270, R7 M260, and R5 M255 cards. They use the Graphics CoreNext 1.0 feature set. These cards are clocked higher than their predecessors, but that does come with a decreased memory bandwidth and DDR3 memory not GDDR5 memory. There is no word yet on if AMD will release any high-performance mobile GPUs, but expect more of that around Computex time.

radeon-m300

On the desktop side things are not all that exciting either. These also seem to be rebrands as well and fit with the accidental leak by HP of the R9 380 the other day. There are actually seven new desktop GPUs, but the only ones to really look at are the R9 380, R9 370 and R9 360.

radeon-300-oem

The R9 380 looks like it will be a rebrand of the R9 285 and it is the first time we have seen AMD’s Tonga chip rebranded. The R9 370 will be a rebrand of R7 265 card with a slightly higher clock speed. This rebrand is a bit worry-some as it is the 4th time AMD has rebranded Pitcairn and it is over 3 years old. The card will lack modern functionality like the ability to decode 4K H.264 video, AMD’s improved power management and support for AMD Freesync technology. Finally the R9 360 will be a rebrand of the R9 260 based on the Bonaire GPU.

Do keep in mind that these are the OEM versions of the card, made for system integrator’s only. The actual retail versions of these cards could be different and offer different specifications. AMD is of course holding back its next generation of higher-end cards till at least Computex from what we are hearing.

Source: Anandtech via eTeknix | News Archive

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