It’s blowing up to storm the graphics card market. In less than a week, AMD will take up the fight against Nvidia with a new Radeon generation, where the graphics processor “Fiji” or Radeon Fury, which is believed to be its official name, will take on the GM200 monster circuit in the top enthusiast segment.
The main number for Fiji will be High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), a new type of memory with stacked circuits placed near the graphics processor. This provides several benefits, such as higher bandwidth to lower power consumption and a simplified memory controller, which opens up more stream processors.
Specifications: – AMD Radeon Fury
Fury X (WC) | Fury X (AC) | Fury | R9 290X | |
---|---|---|---|---|
GPU | Fiji XT | Fiji XT | Fiji Pro | Hawaii XT |
Technical | 28 nm | 28 nm | 28 nm | 28 nm |
Family | Pirate Islands | Pirate Islands | Pirate Islands | Volcanic Islands |
Architecture | GCN | GCN | GCN | GCN |
Streamproc. | 4 096 st. | 4 096 st. | 3 584 st. | 2 816 st. |
Texture units | 256 st. | 256 st. | 224 st. | 176 st. |
Raster units | 128 st. | 128 st. | 128 st. | 64 st. |
Memory bus | 4 096-bit | 4 096-bit | 4 096-bit | 512-bit |
Memory amount | 4 GB | 4 GB | 4 GB | 4 GB |
Minnestyp | HBM | HBM | HBM | GDDR5 |
GPU frequency | – | – | – | – |
Turbo frequency | >1 050 MHz | 1 050 MHz | 1 000 MHz | 1 000 MHz |
Performance | 8 602 GFLOPS | 8 602 GFLOPS | 7 168 GFLOPS | 5 632 GFLOPS |
Memory frequency | 1 000 MHz | 1 000 MHz | 1 000 MHz | 5 000 MHz |
Memory bandwidth | 512 GB/s | 512 GB/s | 512 GB/s | 320 GB/s |
Cooling | Water cooling, 120 mm radiator | Air with three axial fans | Air with three axial fans | Air with a radial fan |
TDP | 300 W | 300 W | 275 W | 290 W |
GFLOPS/Watt | >28,7 | 28,7 | 26,1 | 19,4 |
Now Wccftech publishes what is said to be the specifications for the Radeon Fury, which according to the information comes in three versions. At the top is the Radeon Fury X with Fiji XT, whose 4,096 stream processors are clocked at up to 1,050 MHz – at least for the air-cooled variant. With water cooling, it is possible that the clock frequency is higher than that, perhaps to be able to break the Geforce GTX Titan X and justify the price tag over SEK 10,000.
In addition to the Fiji XT in all its glory, a scaled-down Fiji Pro is also expected, where partners are given free rein to develop customized circuit boards and cooling solutions. Here, AMD is said to have turned off one-eighth of the stream processors and that the clock frequency lands at 1,000 MHz, which should still give a modest boost to a Radeon R9 290X.
Another interesting detail is that the power consumption of the Radeon Fury X is stated to be only 10 W over a Radeon R9 290X, while the Radeon Fury is just below. This would mean an increased power efficiency of up to 50 percent, despite the fact that AMD remains with the same 28-nanometer technology as before.
The icing on the cake is that the amount of video memory is only stated to be 4 GB, compared to 6 GB for the competitors Geforce GTX 980 Ti and a full 12 GB for GTX Titan X. Persistent rumors suggest that HBM memory with higher capacity will be available during the summer, which would allow 8 GB for the Radeon Fury, but increasingly point to AMD initially being limited to the lower capacity.
Designed for high resolutions
Despite the memory limitation, the specifications show that Fiji is tailored for high resolutions and to shovel around many pixels. With the graphics processor Hawaii, AMD doubled the number of raster units (ROP) against its predecessor Tahiti, a maneuver that takes place again with Fiji, which is said to have as many as 128. This could mean a doubling in tessellation and fillrate (pixels per second).
Only the top model is relevant in the short term
According to SweClockers, AMD has started communicating the Radeon Fury behind closed doors, but only in the top version with water cooling. When there will be a stripped-down variant and whether the flagship will also be air-cooled is not yet known.