Rumours point to the R9 390/390X being the only brand new silicon, whereas the R9 380 will be based around a Hawaii derivative codenamed ‘Grenada’.
Rumours point to the R9 390/390X being the only brand new silicon, whereas the R9 380 will be based around a Hawaii derivative codenamed ‘Grenada’.
Courtesy of German tech site 3DCentre.org is a collection of strong rumours regarding AMD’s next generation of graphics cards, which will fall under the banner of the Rx 300 series.
Firstly, it now appears almost certain that the flagship will be the R9 390X, with a GPU that goes under the codename Fiji. At this stage the technology under the hood is still up for speculation, however signs are pointing towards the chip consisting of 4096 shaders utilising a fresh GCN 1.3 architecture, and 4GB of video memory with HBM interface 1024-bits wide. In theory this would allow for a memory bandwidth of 640GB/s, and overall performance far exceeding that of the R9 290X. A lesser part with fewer shaders, the R9 390, should also make an appearance.
Down one rung will be the high performance gaming cards designated the R9 380X/380, probably based on an update to Hawaii that’s designated Grenada. Hawaii currently forms the basis of R9 290X, 290 and 295X2 SKUs, with strong performance characteristics. An update to this GPU should allow AMD to reach higher frequencies more reliably, squeezing out yet more performance from a CPU which launched in November 2013. Let down somewhat at launch due to the poor reference cooler, a pin-compatible Grenada GPU could allow partners to ship with their own cooler variants immediately.
Firmly in the mid-range will be the R9 370X/370. Effectively reusing the R9 285’s Tonga GPU and coming in 2GB and 4GB flavours, it could be a very good mid-range part for gaming.
The lineup refresh should appear at the end of Q2 2015, just in time for Computex. However unlike NVIDIA’s Maxwell-based GTX 900-series it breaks up the AMD GPU range into different underlying architectures, which could have some impact on range-wide feature support.
Finally, a premium-level dual-GPU R9 395X2 is apparently on the cards for late 2015
As always, news of this sort should be taken with a grain of salt. It’s certainly true that (NVIDIA’s GTX 970 memory issues notwithstanding) AMD have their work cut out for them even keeping up with the opposition.
Source: 3DCentre.org (via TechPowerUp)
