Details leak on AMD’s upcoming Radeon Fury
Leaks around AMD’s next-generation Radeon (now dubbed the Radeon Fury, though we have no official brand confirmation on that moniker) have popped up in quick succession in the past weeks. This latest data points to a triple-GPU launch, with variants of the card debuting in air-cooled, water-cooled, and a slimmed-down version of the card that will offer most of its performance at (most likely) a significantly lower price.
The leak in question comes from WCCFTech, which has a decidedly checkered reputation where these issues are concerned. Given this, if you normally take a pinch of salt with your rumormongering, I’d recommend a tablespoon, just to be on the safe side. That said,some of this data lines up with what we’ve seen elsewhere and independently heard ourselves. Fiji, if our own sources are accurate, will debut in three three different SKUs:
Let’s start at the top and work our way down. The 64 compute units and 4096 cores are expected, while the ROP and TMU counts are plausible, if unconfirmed. The R9 290X packs 64 ROPS and 176 TMUs, so we can safely assume that Fiji would increase its ratios on both counts. Nvidia certainly pushed the envelope on both metrics with Maxwell, but then it had fewer ROPS to start with. The rumor of three separate part variants is something we’ve also heard from our own sources, and it stands to reason that AMD might push the core (and possibly memory) clocks higher with the new water-cooled hardware as opposed to the air-cooled variants.
Whether the actual listed clock speeds are accurate is another question altogether. One thing I learned when I reviewed a water-cooled CryoVenom over at PC Magazine is that the Hawaii silicon is capable of hitting substantially higher clocks, provided you can cool the chip. That card was capable of 1225MHz, compared to a stock frequency of 947MHz. Given the amount of time AMD has had to tweak the design, it’s possible we’ll see the company launch hardware above the 1GHz threshold or offer the option to intrepid overclockers.
The power consumption figures, however, are… well, “surprising” is the kindest word I can think of. We know already that engineering boards sport dual 8-pin connectors and are rumored to draw up to 375W at the wall. It wouldn’t be at all surprising for AMD to improve on this figure between engineering silicon and final hardware, but a drawdown from 375W to 300W is enormous for this late stage. This is one of the weakest links in the table as published.
Finally, we’ve got no word on the lower-end GPU with 3584 cores. While I’ve theorized that AMD would likely create such a card, the news to date has mostly focused on the high-end variants, not this new chip.
