The AMD rumor mill never stops churning. The latest rumors from WCCFTech piggy-back speculation on the back of the late-September release of Radeon embedded graphics cards in order to postulate a desktop Polaris refresh. The new theoretical cards would be labeled Radeon RX 465, 475, and 485 and offer lower TDPs compared to current-gen models. Grab a shovel and get started on that salt pile over there.

The facts come first. AMD released the embedded Radeon E9550 on September 27. That card packs 2304 SPs with a base clock of 1.12GHz and a boost clock of up to 1.26 Hz, along with 8GB of GDDR5 at 7 GT/s on a 256-bit bus. The E9550 has the same number of SPs as the Radeon RX 480, but its core and memory clocks are a bit slower. The 95W TDP of the E9550 is a lot more interesting, as it's about 35% less than the RX 480's 150W TDP.

The embedded Radeon E9260, released at the same time, delivers up to 2.5 TFLOPs from 896 SPs at unspecified clocks paired with 7 GT/s memory on a 128-bit bus, all with total TDP of 50W. The hardware specifications for this card are similar to the RX 460's, but with higher throughput and decreased power consumption.

The speculation comes second. The notorious rumor-mongers over at WCCFTech take the opportunity to speculate about refreshed Polaris desktop cards, which they are bold enough to dub RX 465, 475, and 485. The site's optimists predict the apperance of an RX 465 with a slight clock speed bump, bringing floating-point performance up from 2.15 to 2.5 TFLOPS while power consumption drops from 75W to "less than 50W." A possible Radeon RX 485 with RX 480-like clock speeds and increased efficiency would get AMD close to the 2.8X performance-per-watt claims it made at the Polaris launch.

The embedded cards are real products. Everything else detailed above is speculation. AMD could be harvesting the cream-of-the-crop Polaris dies for sale to specialized customers with deeper pockets. If any of this is true, AMD might have an easier time competing with Nvidia's onslaught of efficient Pascal chips, including the rumored GeForce GTX 1050 Ti.