We talked about the upcoming Radeon RX 500 series respin from AMD quite a bit already. It seems that the GPUs however might get a slight advantage as AMD seems to be moving towards a newer LLP (low power plus) fabrication process at Global Foundries.

Now I am not 100% sure if AMD isn't already using 14LPP, which is the equivalent to 14nm Finfet+ fabrication.

Basically you are looking at the Polaris GPU architecture which could get bumped up towards an updated generation fabrication node process, which would be 14LPP. The node before 14LPP was 14LPE (Low Power Early). The updated one is a 14LPP (Low Power Plus) node, an enhanced version with higher performance and lower power.

If AMD is shifting the Radeon RX 500 series to the 14nm LPP nodes this will (well can) have an effect on overall power consumption and efficiency. It also might allow AMD to clock the product a notch higher then you're use to. How big of a change that is going to make, remains topic of discussion alright.

** update - I am going to post a small update here. I was thinking about it this afternoon and Series 400 products like Polaris might actually already be on 14LPP from Global Foundries. If that assumption is right then this news-item would be invalidated. The only thing AMD could do is order GPUs based on one process update later, that would be 14LPU as currently used by Samsung. Samsungs 14LPU 14nm-fab is available and that is the 4th iteration of 14nm Finfet.

Also a topic that remains a bit of a discussion is the Radeon RX 580. As it seems and looks right now this simply would be a higher-clocked Polaris XT (RX 480) GPU with your standard 2304 stream processors, 144 TMUs, and 32 ROPs with 8GB of GDDR5 RAM at 8Gbps. This all obviously remains speculation.

Last week we already spotted entries for the Radeon 560, 570 and 580 in the latest Catalyst 17.3.2 drivers, matching the existing Polaris hardware ID codes.





