AMD employees clear Radeon R9 380X – new flagship with stacked memories

While Nvidia is drumming on the architecture Maxwell, it is quiet from rival AMD. Despite tough competition from the Geforce GTX 900 series, it does not look like there will be any new graphics cards in the Radeon family until at best ahead of the spring. The delay can very well be explained by the fact that the red team is working on a major technology breakthrough.

At the German 3D Center, a bunch of attentive forum users discover that a couple of engineers at AMD can not help but shine with the credentials of the social network Linkedin. One of these reveals without hesitation that the person in question worked on the design of the upcoming Radeon R9 380X, which is described as the largest circuit in the performance class.

Not only that. The same engineer adds that the Radeon R9 380X has already arrived tape-out, the step in development when the design leaves the drawing board and is transferred to production. This indicates that it does not take very long before the first circuits find out from the contracted semiconductor manufacturer.

Another engineer at AMD adds another piece to the puzzle and gossips that the person in question worked on developing the world’s first graphics processor with stacked memories. The fact that it is probably precisely the performance model Radeon R9 380X is confirmed by the fact that the circuit is said to consume 300 W and thus balance on the limit of the PCI Express specification’s maximum permissible power output.

In addition, it appears that the new graphics processor uses a specific type of stacked memory (2.5D interposer stacking). The memories are not placed on top of the graphics processor (3D vertical stacking) but side by side on the same substrate, probably to avoid complications due to heat generation.

It is the same concept that is also used in Nvidia’s upcoming architecture Pascal, which according to current planning will not arrive until 2016.