AMD releases their RX 590 – A Polaris Evolution

With the release of AMD’s Ryzen 2nd Generation processors earlier this year, we got to see first hand what AMD could achieve with Globalfoundries’ refined 12nm lithography technology, delivering a significant generational leap over their 1st Generation Ryzen hardware without changing the product’s die size or transistor counts in any meaningful way. This left us wondering, could the rest of AMD’s product stack be improved with a transition to 12nm? 

With AMD’s new RX 590 we can see what 12nm can deliver on the GPU front, optimising AMD’s Polaris architecture to deliver increased clock speeds and performance levels over all of their previous Polaris designs, providing a staggering performance boost considering the relatively low development effort that went into the design. 

In AMD’s own marketing materials, the RX 590 will offer a performance boost of around 12% when compared to a stock RX 580, and up to a 15% clock speed advantage, a change that will give AMD an edge in the mid-range GPU battle between Radeon and Geforce. So far Nvidia has not spoken about a Turing-based replacement for the GTX 1060, making now the perfect time for AMD to utilise the power to 12nm to gain some momentum in the mid-range GPU market. 

When compared to their stock RX 480, AMD has delivered a tremendous increase to Polaris’ performance over time, with boost GPU clock speeds increasing from 1266MHz on stock RX 480 designs to 1545MHz on basic RX 590 designs. When looking at both GPU’s base clock speeds, AMD has achieved a boost of 349MHz, which is a 31% increase in base clock speed since the release of Polaris. With the RX 590, AMD has also decided to drop their 4GB 7Gbps models from the lineup, seeing a greater need for faster memory and larger frame buffers in modern games. 

Below are the reference clock speeds of AMD’s 2304-core Polaris lineup over time. 

Â	AMD RX 480	AMD RX 580	AMD RX 590
Architecture	Polaris	Polaris	Polaris
Lithography	14nm	14nm	12nm
Die Size	232mm^2	232mm^2	232mm^2
Transistors	5.7 Billion	5.7 Billion	5.7 Billion
Stream Processors	2304	2304	2304
ROPs	32	32	32
Base Clock	1120MHz	1257MHz	1469MHz
Boost Clock	1266MHz	1340MHz	1545MHz
TFLOPS	Up to 5.8	Up to 6.2	Up to 7.1
Memory	4/8GB GDDR5	4/8GB GDDR5	8GB GDDR5
Memory Speed	7/8Gbps	7/8Gbps	8Gbps
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	224/256GB/s	224/256GB/s	256GB/s