AMD’s graphics for the Hawaii graphics processor is leaking online

With the first models in the Radeon 200 series on the market, the focus is on the upcoming flagships Radeon 290X and 290. Both are based on the new graphics processor Hawaii with a revised version of the architecture Graphics Core Next and as many as six billion transistors.

After a battle of power leaks, even more press material is now being found online. This time it is a technical review of the news in the graphics processor Hawaii, where it appears, among other things, that the circuit measures 438 mm², which can be compared to 551 mm² for Nvidia GK110 in Geforce GTX 780 and Titan.

On the whole, the same overall design is maintained as the Tahiti circuit in the Radeon HD 7900 series and the R9 280X. The biggest difference is that Tahiti contains two shader units while these are expanded to four in Hawaii, which at least in theory doubles both the tessellation performance and fillrate (pixels per second). A doubling is also noticeable for the number of raster units (ROP), which now amounts to 64 calculation units.

Each individual shader unit contains eleven computing units with 64 stream processors and four texture units each, giving a total of 2,816 stream processors and 176 texture units. The four shader units are connected via a unified bus with eight asynchronous schedulers. In addition, there is 1 MB L2 cache with read and write performance of up to one terabyte per second.

This includes a 512-bit memory bus with a clock frequency of 5.0 GHz GDDR5, which results in a total bandwidth of 320 GB / s. In addition, the new memory interface will take up 20 percent less space compared to the 384-bit bus. AMD is talking about 50 percent higher memory bandwidth per square millimeter of silicon.

The architectural details are consistent with previously leaked data, which suggests that the flagship Radeon R9 290X will have 2,816 stream processors up to 1.0 GHz and 4 GB of GDDR5 memory at 5.0 GHz. The scaled-down cousin Radeon R9 290 is expected to stop at 2,560 stream processors at up to 947 MHz, but retains the same memory configuration with associated clock frequencies.

So far it is not known when the Radeon R9 290X and 290 will be on the market. However, there is much to suggest a sales start in connection with the launch of Battlefield 4, which will be released on October 29 in North America.

Source: 3dcenter.org.