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

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."

Comments

So... yield problems, in other words.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So... yield problems, in other words.

[MoarSauce123]

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.

False apology

[quonset]

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.

Smells

[Zanderama]

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".

Re:GPU market now fully in the hand of fraudsters?

[goose-incarnated]

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.

Worse than it sounds

[velinion]

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.