If you are in the hunt for a new prebuilt desktop or laptop, you may come across an ostensibly new GPU lineup—AMD quietly added several Radeon 600 series models to its website. Looking at the specs, however, they all appear to be rebadged Radeon 500 series GPUs based on the company's previous generation Polaris architecture, and not Navi.
There are five models in all. Here they are, along with the previous generation GPUs they align with:
- Radeon RX 640—Radeon 550X
- Radeon 630—Radeon 540X
- Radeon 625—Radeon 535
- Radeon 620—Radeon 530
- Radeon 610—Radeon 520
The Radeon RX 640 is the only one with an "RX" designation. All of them are destined for OEM configurations (meaning they will be used by companies like Dell, HP, and so forth), and are not likely to be sold as off-the-shelf parts. All of them take aim at laptops, while the Radeon RX 640 and Radeon 630 will also be used in desktops.
Our friends at Anandtech combed through the specs and found that each of the 600 series GPUs corresponds identically to a 500 series part, as outlined above. It's technically possible that there are some under-the-hood refinements on the 600 series, but spec-for-spec, these are 500 series GPUs with new names.
The 600 series will launch in the third quarter, possibly around the same time as systems featuring Intel's 10th generation Core "Ice Lake" CPUs. Those are expected to arrive in September. That said, we're not expecting to see AMD's 600 series GPUs paired with Ice Lake processors, at least not initially.
