14 DAY TRIAL // After months of only desktops getting Radeon Rx-series graphics cards, Advanced Micro Devices has officially launched the series intended for mobile personal computers, the Rx M200.
It is not a shock to see the Sunnyvale, California-based company using the Consumer Electronics Show as the launch pad for its new graphics processing units.
After all, AMD did the same for the AMD Kaveri APUs, which will finally let desktop makers set up a new configuration based on Steamroller.
But we digress. The Radeon R9/R7/R5 M200 line of graphics cards, or rather discrete graphics processing units, hasn't actually been launched in full.
Only one from each Rx segment has been unveiled for now, with the best being the Radeon R9 290X (obviously).
It's probably just a Radeon HD 8970M rebranded though, maybe with better clocks but still just a rebrand. We don't know for certain because AMD didn't exactly detail the specs.
The same goes for the Radeon R7 M265 and R5 M230, which are also probably rebranded HD 8000M series, but we don't know which.
Don't be too put off though. NVIDIA's GeForce 800M line will probably be just rebranded chips as well.
Besides, at this point, the two GPU giants are competing over a pretty narrow market segment, since both Intel and AMD CPUs/APUs have integrated graphics now, decent and good, respectively.
So, since the discrete cards from AMD and NVIDIA are already pretty strong, much stronger than the integrated chips on the CPUs themselves, pushing through with a new architecture isn't as urgent as on the desktop front.
After all, laptops are selling pretty well still, only desktops suffering from declining consumer interest. By extension, it's not so important to bring out a new mobile GPU architecture at the same rate as there.
AMD will release the specs of the Radeon R9/R7/R5 soon, or we'll find them out from the technical sheets of laptops from Clevo, Lenovo, MSI and Alienware.
