AMD rebrands Mobility Radeon HD 4000 chips into 500v series

In an unexpected move, AMD has announced it will rebrand mainstream and low end chips based on the RV700 architecture: RV710 and RV730.

The new chips are being rebranded as the Mobility Radeon 560v for the Radeon HD 4600 equivalent and Mobility Radeon 540v and 530v.

It is still not public if these models differ in clockspeed from the Mobility Radeon HD 4000 parts but they may well not. The only difference between the 80 shader, RV710 models is that the Radeon 540v supports DVD upscaling and Dynamic Contrast, a difference that may not be found on the silicon itself but may be constrained by the availability of higher clocked parts on the 540v model, which means more computational power to spare for these tasks.

The RV700 two chips were being sold as the Mobility Radeon HD 4670, 4650, 4570, 4530 and 4330 on the mobile space and featured the following specs:

• Mobility Radeon HD 4600: 320 shaders, 128bit bus, RV730
• Mobility Radeon HD 4500 and 4300 series: 80 shaders, 64bit bus, RV710

Manufacturers tend to depart from old naming schemes to "help customers decide" in favor of their brand but it it's a mystery why AMD would want to re-brand the same chips with a lower model number which doesn't compare as favorably to 5000 or 4000 as 5000v would. Even more so, an uneducated customer will find itself wondering why he should take a Mobility Radeon HD 560v instead of an integrated HD 4200 series GPU, which also features DirectX 10.1 support.

Adding insult to the injury, AMD already sells both RV710 and RV730 chips under the Mobility Radeon HD 5100 series - 5145 and 5165 - in which case the 5165 based on the RV730 chip is being placed below the DX11 capable 80 shader chips based on the "Evergreen" architecture. I would certainly take the Mobility Radeon HD 5165 instead.

The re-brand begs three other questions though:

• Who is running the marketing department?
• Is AMD preparing itself to announce a new generation of desktop cards under the Radeon HD 600 series?
• Is AMD having severe problems with producing "Evergreen" chips for the low end? It certainly seems so. AMD has already released the 80 shader and 400 shader DX11 chips a while ago.

AMD has been contacted in an effort to get hold of additional details about the new chips.