One Cryptic tweet from DICE Tech. Directer Johan Andersson referencing a pre-release GPU sample could indicate fun times to come for Red Team adherents.
One Cryptic tweet from DICE Tech. Directer Johan Andersson referencing a pre-release GPU sample could indicate fun times to come for Red Team adherents.
Dual-GPU Fiji ‘R9 Fury X2’ via Tweaktown.com
Six months ago AMD revealed the Radeon R9 Fury X, their brand new flagship GPU which debuted High Bandwidth Memory and featured closed loop liquid cooling. Alongside the Fury X however CEO Dr. Lisa Su also teased a dual-GPU design based on two Fiji GPUs unofficially dubbed the R9 Fury X2, a design which AMD pledged would be released later on in the year.
Fast-forward to today and the twin-Fiji design remains a thing of rumour and whispers. Despite a few board shots – most originating from the days following the Fury X announcement – no further official announcements have been made regarding the presumably still upcoming card. The strongest indication it wouldn’t be consigned to myth was the September leak of a shipping note describing a batch of ‘FIJIGEMINI’ Video Cards, also featuring an attached Cooler Master heatsink, but that is scant pickings in today’s world of Chinese benchmark leaks and surreptitious die shots.
Until today the rumour-mill was quiet, but exploded back into action following a tweet from @repi – otherwise known as DICE Technical Director Johan Andersson.
The trigger is the mention of a pre-release GPU, of which the only one widely known of is the aforementioned dual-GPU Fiji. It’s also likely that said GPU would be utilising a liquid cooler similar to the Radeon R9 Fiji X and reference Radeon R9 295X2, as this would be the most efficient means of keeping a dual-Fiji GPU under control. Not much should be read into the closed loop liquid cooler rupturing during shipping though, these things happen quite often with pre-release hardware samples.
Andersson has in the past been a good source for news on AMD graphics hardware thanks to DICE’s strong association with their API development team. Furthermore Andersson himself teased the R9 Fury X some weeks before the card’s official unveiling. It could be an unreleased NVIDIA card, but that seems unlikely.
As for the technical details of ‘Gemini’, relatively little is known except that it will feature two Fiji GPUs on one PCB with 8GB HBM memory. Early board shots with two 8-Pin PCIe connectors and relatively simple power subsystem could indicate that the card as a whole is based on two ‘R9 Nano-esq’ GPUs throttled to keep power draw under control, but even then the card would still be a monster performer with CrossFire-compatible software.
SOURCE: Tweaktown, Guru3D
