AMD Announces OEM Desktop Radeon 300 Series

Along with today’s announcement of the OEM mobile Radeon M300 series, AMD has also announced the OEM desktop Radeon 300 Series. This was a rather low-key launch with only a very brief press release on the matter along with AMD updating the OEM Radeon website, and as one might expect this is for good reason.

We’ve been through this event once before – most recently with the OEM HD 8000 series – so our regular readers will know the drill. Whether or not GPU manufacturers have new GPUs, OEMs will want new parts to sell, which leads to GPU manufacturers engaging in rebranding and subtle spec changes to create new parts to sell under a new series name. In AMD’s case this is complicated by the fact that they have been updating their GPUs in a piecemeal fashion – Hawaii, Bonaire, and Tonga have all landed at very different times – and AMD is not done yet as they’re going to be launching a new high-end GPU this quarter. So AMD needs a product lineup to include both the new part and their retained parts under a single brand, which leads to another incentive for rebadging.

In any case, as these are OEM parts I advise not reading into the names and specifications too much. AMD’s OEM and Retail parts can be very different at times – and at other times there aren’t any retail parts at all (HD 8000) – so these OEM parts aren’t necessarily indicative of what we’re going to see in retail in the coming months. Though based on AMD’s actions with the Radeon 200 series, we may yet see a similar rebadge happen for the retail 300 series.

Starting things off, we have the OEM R9 series. Today’s release tops out at R9 380 OEM (I can only imagine AMD is saving 390 for their new GPU), along with the R9 370 OEM and R9 360 OEM. The R9 380 OEM appears to be a variant of the desktop R9 285, which marks the first time that a Tonga card has been released in an OEM configuration. The quoted clockspeeds are identical to the retail R9 285, which means the “up to” GPU clockspeed should result in the R9 380 OEM being perfectly identical to the R9 285 if given its maximum configuration.

Meanwhile for the R9 370 OEM we have a cut-down Pitcairn card, with only 1024 of its 1280 SPs active. This makes it a variant of the retail R7 265, though with a slightly higher maximum GPU clockspeed. Truth be told I’m a bit worried to see a fresh Pitcairn part in 2015; Pitcairn has been a workhorse for AMD, having now survived into its 4th generation of cards. However at over 3 years old and based on GCN 1.0, it lacks more modern functionality such as the ability to decode 4K H.264 video files, AMD’s improved power management technology, and support for AMD’s Freesync technology.

Finally we have the R9 360 OEM. This appears to be a variant of the R9 260 OEM, featuring an AMD Bonaire GPU with only 768 of its 896 SPs enabled. Oddly, the listed memory bandwidth for the part, 104GB/sec, would require 6.5GHz GDDR5 memory given Bonaire’s 128-bit bus. I suspect that may be an error on AMD’s part, though it’s not outside the realm of possibility. In any case the R9 360 OEM also appears to be a regression from the R9 260 OEM; the latter was a fully enabled Bonaire part, whereas this one is not. At the very least it’s GCN 1.1 based, so it will have the newer features that the Pitcairn based R9 370 OEM lacks.

Up next is the R7 300 OEM series, which is composed of the R7 350 OEM and R7 340 OEM. Both of these cards are straight-up rebadges of AMD’s existing R7 250 OEM and R7 240 OEM parts, and both are based on the same GCN 1.0 Oland GPU. With just 384 SPs these are low cost, low performing parts. The difference between the two is their clockspeeds, with R7 350 being clocked quite a bit higher, whereas R7 340 is clocked lower in exchange for being available as a low-profile card. Unfortunately the memory situation is quite complex here, as these cards can be equipped with either GDDR5 or DDR3; the GDDR5 versions will of course be the much faster versions.

Among its other quirks, Oland lacks a hardware video decoder. So these parts are likely to be paired with low-end AMD Kaveri APUs, possibly for a Dual Graphics configuration.

Finally, for the R5 300 OEM series we have two more Oland parts. These are ultra low end, low-profile single slot parts. AMD does not even publish the GPU bandwidth numbers for these parts, and as a result I suspect these may be 64-bit parts to further cut down on costs. Of particular note, the R5 330 lacks HDMI support, so it’s almost certainly geared towards APAC markets where VGA is still in common use.

Wrapping things up, AMD’s press release mentions that these new OEM parts are shipping now. HP is already confirmed to be shipping PCs with these new cards, and we expect other OEMs to ramp up as well as they launch their back-to-school season computers.

Update: AMD Announces Radeon M300 Series Notebook Video Cards

Along with a bevy of roadmap announcements at financial analyst day, AMD has also slipped in a full-on mobile GPU announcement today at the event.

Being announced today is the Radeon M300 series. With so much other news coming out of FAD we’re still tracking down more information on the product line, but of the information released by AMD so far, we do know that these parts are being advertised as refined parts with better efficiency and power management. AMD’s FAD presentation has not made any mention of what specific GPUs are being used here or of specific SKUs (we may yet see a press release), so it’s not clear whether there are new GPUs involved or if these are simply rebadges of existing GPUs and products.

AMD does note that M300 systems should already be available from several of AMD’s usual partners, including Alienware, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba. Meanwhile given the timing of the announcement and the fact that AMD is specifically advertising these GPUs as supporting Dual Graphics mode with AMD’s A-series APUs, I suspect some of these GPUs may be intended to work alongside AMD’s Carrizo APU, which is due this year.

Update: AMD has since released the details of the M300 SKUs on their website, and though they’re not incredibly detailed, they give us an idea of just what AMD is up to.

Unfortunately it looks like everything is going to be a rebadge/rehash of AMD’s existing GCN 1.0 GPUs. While AMD’s specs do not confirm which GPUs we’re looking at, and hence we’re admittedly taking an educated guess, based on the specs and features we have every reason to believe we’re looking at Cape Verde and Oland, the two GPUs that also backed AMD’s M200 series. I had been hoping for a cut-down Bonaire in here, to bring GCN 1.1 to mobile, but it doesn’t look like that’s in the cards.

What we have then is a 3 product stack with some very unusual configurations. Compared to their M200 counterparts, all 3 M300 parts have much higher GPU clockspeeds. AMD is now allowing clockspeeds over 1GHz, even for the low-end M330. Though as always, we need to remind everyone that these are “up to” speeds, and OEMs get the final choice in what the shipping clockspeed of a M300 part will be in any given laptop.

And although clockspeeds are up, memory bandwidth is way, way down. All of these parts ship with DDR3, and of those only the M375 gets a 128-bit memory bus. The other two parts, based on Oland, are shipping with a 64-bit memory bus. On the M200 series AMD was using GDDR5 with Cape Verde and the full 128-bit memory bus with Oland, so these new parts have half (or less) of the memory bandwidth of their M200 counterparts.  The fact that AMD did this while increasing clockspeeds (which generally has a knock-on impact on power consumption) is very odd, and I would expect that these new parts are going to be bandwidth starved and will not reach the full potential of their respective GPUs. Meanwhile there’s also some uncertainty over the number of ROPs enabled on the M360 and M330; with 64-bit memory buses on a chip that natively has a 128-bit memory bus, AMD may have disabled half of the ROPs in the process.

Looking at these parts overall, in AMD’s FAD event today the company specifically noted the dual graphics capabilities of the M300 series, and I suspect that’s precisely what these parts are meant for. They’re not intended to be stand-alone, but rather they’re designed to be paired with Carrizo/Kaveri APUs to inject more graphics silicon to improve GPU performance. In which case we’re looking at another wrinkle in performance, not only from dual graphics but from the fact that AMD’s APUs tend to be hungry for bandwidth as well, in which case the impact of these slower memory buses may not be as great.

Finally, it’s interesting to note that AMD only went up to M375 here. They did not introduce an M380 or M390 series part, not even rebadging the Pitcairn/Tonga parts that compose the faster members of the M200 series. This may be a sign that AMD intends to introduce faster parts later on, but for the moment that’s merely speculation on my part.