AMD Mobility Radeon 500 is OEM Rebrand

Last week during CES, we got our first hint of AMD’s upcoming mobile plans. From a new Lenovo laptop, we found out that AMD is releasing a new 500 series of mobile Radeon GPUs. At that time, there was no indication if that would be a rebrand or would it be some new GPUs. AMD has now confirmed that the new 500 series will be an OEM rebrand of the existing 400 series, at least when it comes to mobile GPUs.

OEM rebrands are nothing new as pretty much everyone does them these days. Even when new GPUs are released, older generations are often rebranded under the new lineup to help boost sales. OEMs also like to have new model numbers to show off to customers ever year as well to promote upgrades and a sense of progress. AMD’s most recent major rebrand was the HD 8000 series which was OEM exclusive. For the new 500 series, we also have an RX 570 being revealed in addition to the RX 560M from earlier

With Polaris out and Vega targeting the high end, AMD doesn’t have a lot to offer for the mobile segment just yet. While there is an upcoming Polaris 12, details are scant and we have no idea where that chip will fit in. Vega 11 is also not set to arrive until 2018 so this year will be a year of rebrands for the mobile side. The more interesting question is if we will see the same rebranding take place for the desktop lineup. AMD also has the option to introduce slight faster variants like the 4X5 as their naming scheme allows for. Hopefully, we will have our answers from the Vega launch.