AMD unofficially confirms Radeon Flagship – R9 390X - Launches at Computex

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 03/05/2015 07:41 PM | source: | 80 comment(s)

Over at GDC AMD did not announce the pending Radeon R9 390X flagship just yet as many had hoped - then again, they kind of did. The Fiji XT based monster was apparently powering the Showdown demo on the Oculus Rift Crescent Bay. So we know for sure they are having a bit of volume with the engineering samples.

How do we know this ? Well, it helps that AMD employees use Twitter:

The R9 390X graphics card will be based on AMD’s upcoming flagship Fiji XT GPU. The graphics card will be the first ever to feature stacked high bandwidth memory, or what you guys know as HBM. If we compile a thing or two in a chart, this is what the summer of 2015 will offer us in the enthusiast range (all speculation of course):

	Stream Processors	Memory	Memory Bandwidth	Memory Interface	GPU Boost	Compute Performance
AMD Radeon R9 390X Fiji XT	4096	4GB HBM	640 GB/S	4096-bit HBM	~1017Mhz	~8.0 TFLOPs
Nvidia GeForce Titan X GM200-400	3072	12GB GDDR5	336 GB/S	384-bit GDDR5	~1216MHz	6.0~7.0 TFLOPs
AMD Radeon R9 290X Hawaii XT	2816	4GB GDDR5	320 GB/S	512-bit GDDR5	1000Mhz	5.6 TFLOPs
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980	2048	4GB GDDR5	224 GB/S	256-bit GDDR5	1216Mhz	4.6 TFLOPs

It is rumored that Fiji XT will get 4096 stream processors with 4GB of HBM VMEMORY. This is stacked memory and therefor the bus width is gigantic. In fact that would be a 4096-bit memory interface. The GPU memory interface is indicated to operate at 1.25Gb/s data-rate (1.25GHz effective DDR frequency) and delivers enormous 640GB/s memory bandwidth. The R9 390 series will be cooled with the help of an Asetek liquid cooler. Meanwhile bad news as to the release date, it now is said that this product will be announced not anytime sooner than Computex, which is June 2015.

“We are confident that as we get into the second half of 2015 with the launch of that new graphics product, we will gain back the market share which is low from my standpoint and historically,” said Devinder Kumar, chief financial officer of AMD. “We need to be significantly higher than where we are right now.”