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AMD Quietly Made Some Radeon RX 560 Graphics Cards Worse (pcworld.com)

Posted by msmash on from the silent-moves dept.

Brad Chacos: When the Radeon RX 560 launched in April it was the only RX 500-series card with a meaningful under-the-hood tech boost compared to the RX 400-series. The graphics processor in the older RX 460 cards packed 14 compute units and 896 stream processors; the upgraded Radeon RX 560 bumped that to 16 CUs and 1,024 SPs. Now, some -- but not all -- of the Radeon RX 560s you'll find online have specs that match the older 460 cards, and sometimes run at lower clock speeds to boot. AMD's Radeon RX 560 page was also quietly altered to include the new configurations at some point, Heise.de discovered. The last snapshot of the page by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine occurred on July 7 and only lists the full-fat 16 CU version of the card, so the introduction of the nerfed 896 SP model likely occurred some time after that. Sifting through all of the available Radeon RX 560s on Newegg this morning reveals a fairly even split between the two configurations, all of which are being sold under the same RX 560 name. In a statement, AMD acknowledged the existence of 14 Compute Unit (896 stream processors) and 16 Compute Unit (1024 stream processor) versions of the Radeon RX 560. "We introduced the 14CU version this summer to provide AIBs and the market with more RX 500 series options. It's come to our attention that on certain AIB and etail websites there's no clear delineation between the two variants. We're taking immediate steps to remedy this: we're working with all AIB and channel partners to make sure the product descriptions and names clarify the CU count, so that gamers and consumers know exactly what they're buying. We apologize for the confusion this may have caused."

40 comments

  1. So... yield problems, in other words. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Reading between the lines, one suspects that they have yield problems on the new GPUs and are having to fudge the specs to meet capacity.

    1. Re:So... yield problems, in other words. by MoarSauce123 · · Score: 2

      Common practice, partially working chips are sold with the broken components turned off. The level of brokenness varies, in some cases there may only be negligible defects. That was the case with several AMD processors years ago and it was fairly easy to turn the dormant cores back on. Same with the old pencil trick to run the processors at a higher native clock speed without external overclocking. Nevertheless, they should have named the crippled GPUs differently. Rather naive to think that there will be no confusion when selling two different things by the same name.

    2. Re:So... yield problems, in other words. by DarthVain · · Score: 1

      Exactly.

      If they really cared they would update their naming scheme rather than depending on consumers to sift though a spec page to see if it is the correct version or not.

      Additionally they could abandon their ridiculous naming scheme altogether that they have been following for years and actually name their products something meaningful rather than a bunch of nonsense. That said, when your only competition is nVidia which uses their own equally baffling naming scheme I guess there isn't much pressure to change. They'll both just confuse their customers for PROFIT!

      I've bee around computers and hardware my whole life (longer than most, at least insofar as video cards have actually existed), I work in a computer related field, I build my own rigs, and EVEN I when it comes time to pull out the old and buy and new one, or build a new rig pretty much sigh "Oh boy here we go, I'm gonna have to sift through the marketing BS and the rest of the detritus that is the video card industry/market"... Never mind they both have a busted reputation of cheating at all sorts of levels in the past with whatever offering they have. Need some new players to freshen up the place, no more Matrox or 3dx, or anything else out there. It seems the only competition the two current companies have is who can behave worse...

    3. Re:So... yield problems, in other words. by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      Common practice, partially working chips are sold with the broken components turned off. The level of brokenness varies, in some cases there may only be negligible defects. That was the case with several AMD processors years ago and it was fairly easy to turn the dormant cores back on. Same with the old pencil trick to run the processors at a higher native clock speed without external overclocking. Nevertheless, they should have named the crippled GPUs differently. Rather naive to think that there will be no confusion when selling two different things by the same name.

      It's actually a really common practice, and not just for defective GPUs.

      A modern chip requires easily $2-3M when you send it to be fabbed - a single mask costs $100,000 by itself, and modern 10+ metal layer ICs require at least 10-20 masks for the metal layers alone, then there's the masks for the transistors, etc, so you're already spending $2-3M on masks alone. It's why chip revisions are like A0, A1, B0, B1, etc. Minor stepping changes (A0->A1, for example) imply only the metal masks changed - masks are so expensive that there are tons of unconnected transistors and gates sitting idle on the silicon. The reason for this is the space is there, so you might as well fab it in (they're free), so if there is a problem, you have spare transistors and gates available to fix it. So the metal layers changed only to accommodate the fix that rewires and potentially uses these spare transistors and gates. Bigger stepping changes, from A3 to B0, mean the entire mask set was changed, including the silicon transistor layers itself (either they ran out of resources, or as is often the case, they redo the design to get more speed out of it too).

      Also because of this, one design almost always encompasses many SKUs. It owuld not surprise me if the x60 series all used the same silicon design, just the unneeded parts (or bad parts) are disabled, usually by blowing fuses

  2. Laptop versus 4U graphics cards by goombah99 · · Score: 1

    I see GTX 1080s and High end radeons in both laptops and large well ventilated 4U boxes. Are these the same performance? How is this possible given all the fans and larger area of the PCI slot cards? if not how come I don't see some discussions of this?

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:Laptop versus 4U graphics cards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The 1080s are a different product on desktop/mobile but performance is similar. It's possible because the laptops are noisy as fuck and have short battery life.

    2. Re:Laptop versus 4U graphics cards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are mobile versions of those cards which are not usually the same performance. Also, with effective cooling the performance can be maintained for a long time or even indefinitely, but most laptops overheat at some point and have to throttle performance when they do.

    3. Re:Laptop versus 4U graphics cards by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      According to Wikipedia, the 1080's on desktop and mobile have the same specs, except mobile is a TDP of 150W and desktop is 180W.
      Mobile doesn't support Boost 3.0, so peak speed is slightly lower.
      If I had to guess, they're the same chips with a yield split based on voltage. Lower voltage at the same clock means lower power. Or they're identical and the mobile versions just throttle quicker, due to the lower TDP rating.

    4. Re:Laptop versus 4U graphics cards by Hal_Porter · · Score: 0

      Max Q® laptop chips have the Secret Sauce® though. The Secret Sauce® that allows Desktop Class Triple A Title Gaming Performance In A Thin And Light Laptop®.

      It's not just chip binning, it's a More Of A Holistic Approach To Power And Performance®

      The idea is so subtle it can't even be explained without stringing together meaningless buzzwords copied verbatim from press releases.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    5. Re:Laptop versus 4U graphics cards by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I see GTX 1080s and High end radeons in both laptops and large well ventilated 4U boxes. Are these the same performance? How is this possible given all the fans and larger area of the PCI slot cards? if not how come I don't see some discussions of this?

      Sometimes you want larger fans and better ventilation just to get the noise down.
      Smaller doesn't necessarily mean worse cooling, it could also mean noisy to the level of being unusable.

  3. That explains it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have two AMD cards, an older 14CU Bonaire card and a newer Rx560. Both were claiming only 14CU, and I thought it was a configuration problem where libraries were confusing the two cards.

    Well now I'm really unhappy with AMD, and all the BS with unsupporting their opensource drivers (it's been a nightmare, might as well NVidia next round).

    1. Re:That explains it! by higuita · · Score: 1

      AMD is supporting their open source drivers, they are the main work force in the radeon mesa drive!!
      Care to explain better what you mean by that

      --
      Higuita
  4. False apology by quonset · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We're taking immediate steps to remedy this: we're working with all AIB and channel partners to make sure the product descriptions and names clarify the CU count, so that gamers and consumers know exactly what they're buying. We apologize for the confusion this may have caused.

    AMD is only apologizing because they were found out. It's the same story with any company who tries to pull a fast one on consumers and is found out. Then, and only then, are steps taken to remedy the situation. Not before while they were duping their customers. Only afterwards when they were called out for their shenanigans.

  5. I don't know, seems OK to me by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    AMD can't police all their partners. There's too many of them. That said, I"m a little shocked to see Asus' name on the bad boy list with Power Color.

    --
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    1. Re:I don't know, seems OK to me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I doubt anyone is going to cry too hard about 2 CU's on an entry level discrete card. You can lose that much performance between vendor implementations of the same chipset, this is not a big deal. If it were a THEME, if a lot of models had this type of shenanigans going on, that would be something very different.

    2. Re: I don't know, seems OK to me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's AMD's fault for deciding to label those chips the same. It's the AIB's fault for not putting sufficient info on the box, but the problem starts with AMD. They knew what they were doing.

  6. Oh, forgot to add by rsilvergun · · Score: 1

    to be fair to Asus, at least on newegg the lower end RX 560s are clearly labeled with the number of stream processors. I've noticed slight variations of specs for years. I compared about 10 different cards when I bought my bro's 1060 6gb before settling on a Gigabyte.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  7. Smells by Zanderama · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How can AMD blame their partners for not being clear on labelling, after AMD's own website was quietly changed with no reference to the different configurations. Surely if AMD "just" wanted to introduce more 5-series cards they could have called this the 555 or something. I guess they're hoping to release a 660 at some time and then say "wow, look at the improvement over the previous (nerfed) 560".

    1. Re:Smells by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If that's their strategy it's going to backfire. When they release that 660 people are going to want to compare benchmarks. Consumers don't do benchmarks themselves they go to one of the big hardware sites to check. The benchmarks published on those sites would have been recorded shortly after the 560 release, so will all be unnerfed cards. Consumers are going to compare the 660 to the UNNERFED 560 and say "wow, this upgrade is worthless"

    2. Re: Smells by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They'll release that 660 with the same chip as the 560 anyway, in yet another rebranding season. Reviews will show it's not an upgrade, but some will but it anyway. Maybe reuse the Pitcairn die again?

  8. AMD reinvents Gatrox video cards? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Anyone remember when Gateway 2000 leverage the reviews of Matrox video cards but gave OEM specs to Matrox to reduce the quality of the cards? While this was much more profitable for Gateway 2000 than to actually sell what they implied to be providing, their brand eventually took a hit.

    For AMD to claim this is an AIB/channel partner issue ignores the fact they are leveraging existing reviews of the original RX560 to help them profit off their reduced version. If they would at least admit that changing the specification should always require a modified model number to clearly distinguish it, that would be a huge improvement over their current statement. However, the fact they see fit to push the blame for their own choice to re-cycle the same exact model identifier seems to indicate they will probably perform this deceptive practice again in the future.

    1. Re:AMD reinvents Gatrox video cards? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      FYI, in this context AIB = Add In Board, for those that aren't in the graphics card manufacturing industry...

    2. Re:AMD reinvents Gatrox video cards? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      Do those shills on Youtube get free hardware in return for good reviews? How about sites like TomsHardware?

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  9. GPU market now fully in the hand of fraudsters? by ffkom · · Score: 1

    So, nVidia sells you GPUs with part of the memory silently being "low-bandwidth" connected, and AMD silently removes compute units from GPUs of equal naming.
    Now that Intel has basically abandoned all GPU manufacturing, the market seems fully in the hand of fraudsters.
    Hey Electronic Arts, you should enter this market: Just sell some GPU model (let's call it the "LootGPU"), and make it to have random hardware specifications.

    1. Re:GPU market now fully in the hand of fraudsters? by goose-incarnated · · Score: 2

      So, nVidia sells you GPUs with part of the memory silently being "low-bandwidth" connected, and AMD silently removes compute units from GPUs of equal naming. Now that Intel has basically abandoned all GPU manufacturing, the market seems fully in the hand of fraudsters. Hey Electronic Arts, you should enter this market: Just sell some GPU model (let's call it the "LootGPU"), and make it to have random hardware specifications.

      An EA card will be a bare PCB with a voltage regulator and pads for CUs and memory. The actual CUs and memory will be DLC, available on the day of release.

      --
      I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
    2. Re:GPU market now fully in the hand of fraudsters? by Kjella · · Score: 1

      So, nVidia sells you GPUs with part of the memory silently being "low-bandwidth" connected

      No, the specs nVidia gave reviewers were plain wrong:

      The error, as NVIDIA explains it, is that in creating the GTX 970 reviewer's guide, the technical marketing team was unaware of Maxwell's aforementioned and new "partial disable" capabilities when they filled out the GTX 970 specification table. They were aware that the GTX 970 would have the full 256-bit memory bus, and unaware of the ability to independently disable ROPs they assumed that all 64 ROPs and the full 2MB of L2 cache was similarly available and wrote the specification table accordingly. This error then made it into the final copy of the guide, not getting caught even after being shared around various groups at NVIDIA, with that information finally diffused by press such as ourselves.

      Basically, they presented it to reviewers as if it had the full 4GB available at full speed because that's what technical marketing believed themselves, both before release and quite some time after. It's only after shit really hit the fan they talked to the engineers again realized that it didn't. So this seems to me like an honest mistake and not underhanded marketing unless you think all this is a cover story and nVidia intentionally gave out false information to commit fraud, which seems rather extreme. How they handled it, like how long it took to discover it, how they addressed it, how they dealt with customers who had based their purchasing decision on it etc. can probably be the topic of a long debate though.

      I find this story a much worse case of blatant of blatant and underhanded marketing. They didn't accidentally downgrade these specs. They didn't accidentally introduce two different cards with the same model number. This is pretty clearly someone's conscious decision to sell lower spec cards using a name you'll find for example in reviewer's chart giving a certain performance and now won't, even if the stores are updated. It's bait and switch at its worst, it's worse than the simple rebranding they do to make old cards look like part of a new series. It's the kind of shit that makes me wish marketing would die in a fire.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:GPU market now fully in the hand of fraudsters? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fucking AMD never knew shit about GPUs anyway. They just bought ATI, and they were never as good as Nvidia to begin with. WHY IS THIS NEWS?

  10. Who's whining about this more? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Gamers or miners? I swore off ATI years ago after experience with their mach64 junk.

  11. 4850 by mark57 · · Score: 1

    I had a 4850 for about a year, then killed off driver support. this doesn't surprise me.

    1. Re:4850 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's a 2009 model. You're tripping G.

    2. Re:4850 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I had a 4850 for about a year, then killed off driver support. this doesn't surprise me.

      You bought a Vista era (2008) card a year before Windows 8 was released? Fool.

  12. So the new would be... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Considering the older could have been named 555 (a very well known number for us having done any EE at all) instead of 560, shouldn't the new one insted of being numbered 660 be 666?

    Thank you, I'll be her until the weekend.

    1. Re:So the new would be... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Her who... Carol Burnett? If so I'm in like Flynn

  13. Why not give it a different model number? by jonwil · · Score: 1

    Why not give the 14CU lower-powered variant a lower model number. Then there is a clear distinction between the 2 cards and no chance consumers get confused by what the card (or PC) they are buying actually has.

  14. Well, duh! by Maavin · · Score: 1

    Because EVERYONE would suspect that the specs are different?!

    --


    Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
  15. Worse than it sounds by velinion · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is actually worse than it sounds. The RX 560 is identical to the RX 460, except the RX560 has an extra two compute units and a modest clock bump. Selling a "RX 560 with two compute units disabled" is really just selling RX 460 units with a RX560 name. AMDs alterations to the description of the RX560 on their own website show this to be a deliberate move (check the wayback machine ) My guess? They had some 460s that they couldn't sell, so they bumped the clocks a bit and re-defined what a 560 was in the hopes of moving them as "better" cards.

    --
    In life, not all of your questions will be answered; all of your answers will be questioned.
    1. Re:Worse than it sounds by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      My guess? They had some 460s that they couldn't sell, so they bumped the clocks a bit and re-defined what a 560 was in the hopes of moving them as "better" cards.

      My guess is that their yields are poor because of a design flaw, and now they're redefining the product in order to permit them to use defective parts. This move will temporarily make the bean counters happy because they're not throwing dies away, but it will long-term harm them because this is deceptive douchebaggery.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Worse than it sounds by Trogre · · Score: 1

      So both can drive a 4k display at 60Hz and RGB colourspace?

      --
      "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  16. Sure, sure... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    [...] we're working with all AIB and channel partners to make sure the product descriptions and names clarify the CU count, so that gamers and consumers know exactly what they're buying.

    So... and when would they warn people about the price? They are being sold for about the same, in newegg you even get the 1024 stream version for cheaper than the 896... How many fools... erm... costumers were ripped off by AMD play here?

    And that's why I don't buy AMD...