In just a few days time, AMD will be hosting the live event known as Capsaicin and we have been promises a sneak peak of the Radeon Polaris range of graphics cards.
It’s unknown what exactly AMD will be showing off during their Capsaicin event, it could mean anything from a preview of the actual Polaris silicon (whether this silicon is ‘live and functioning’ is another story) to a presentation of some sorts where AMD will tell us more about its architecture.
We probably won’t get all of the specifications of the card and instead AMD will likely focus on marketing and exciting the public over the potential of their new card.
AMD’s Capsaicin event is as much focused on virtual reality as it is anything else, and therefore it’s a great time for team red to show off the Radeon R9 Fury X2 (also known as the Fiji Gemini).
This graphics card is pretty late to the party, and was delayed by AMD after they company cited they were waiting for ‘market conditions’. But the card is quite different to what pretty much anyone in the tech industry expected, the card (formally known as Radeon R9 Fury X2) is titled Radeon Pro Duo, and is a Radeon range of card with FirePro capabilities.
AMD are marketing the card as the best VR experience you can currently get your hands on, and the Radeon Pro Duo is presumably designed for not just end users, but also game developers too.
AMD’s Polaris Block Diagram shows off how the new Radeon 400 series will tempt PC gamers with the 4th generation GCN GPU.
For those of you unfamiliar with the FirePro range of cards, they are AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s Quadro lineup of GPU’s. They typically differ somewhat from the standard gaming orientated GPU, and place emphasis on compute and calculation type workloads. This means a FirePro or Quadro card are brilliant at tasks such as CAD, 3D Studio Max or other such applications, and less focused on being designed to push frame rates on screen.
One could make the assumption this will lead to the Radeon Pro Duo (or the Radeon R9 Fury X2… whatever it ends up being called) behaving in a similar manner to early Titan cards from Nvidia. But of course the question is where the line is draw by AMD regarding performance,
Supposedly the graphics card will feature two Fiji XT based cores, running the same number of Stream Cores, TMU’s and ROPS as the Radeon R9 Fury X (4096, 256, 64) respectively, but the Radeon Pro Duo will obviously double things up thanks to cramming two cores on the PCB. It goes without saying the GPU will also use the same memory configuration the Fury’s have been famous for: a 4096-bit 500 MHz HBM1 memory configuration. From what we understand the Radeon Pro Duo will not lower the clock speeds, which should mean lots of memory bandwidth.
Supposedly the clock speeds of the core will be only around the 730 – 750 MHz, far lower than the 1050MHz that the Fury X runs at. This is likely to help keep the Radeon Pro Duo cooler and suck up less energy – but reports still show the GPU requiring three power connectors (likely 8-pin too).
This will lead to the card being a little longer to that of a standard Fury X based card, and will also feature a watercooling solution too.
This news comes just a day after Nvidia news which hints the GPU’s could start launching in May, and the GeForce GTX 1080 will not feature High Bandwidth Memory 2, and instead use GDDR5X.
If you fancy watching the Capsciain event live, be sure to bookmark the event over at AMD’s official UStream channel here.
Thanks Hardware Battle.
