A few days ago, we’d reported that you’ll be able to march into your local store (or, more realistically, point your web browser to your favorite online store) and purchase the R9 300 series by June 24th (or the 18th for Fiji), and while that hasn’t changed, AMD are planning to announce their cards prior to the date – June 3rd to be precise.
AMD have updated their own website with the following statement: “AMD would like to cordially invite you to our press conference at Computex 2015. You will get the opportunity to see AMD’s latest products and leading-edge technologies, while experiencing immersive visual, computing, and gaming demonstrations.
“During this event, AMD executives and special guests will be introducing new, comprehensive details on AMD’s 2015 product lineup.”
So, according to AMD’s website, we should see a lot more details on the next generation GPU’s by June 3rd. “Comprehensive details” will hopefully means just that – a full breakdown of exactly what we’ll find under the hood of each of the parts. The earliest rumor of the R9 390X was of course the High Bandwidth Memory, and something AMD admitted to me on the phone was virtually impossible to keep under-wraps because of the nature of going through approval of a new memory standard. But other details such as shaders, clock speeds and even the final names of the cards is still a bit of a mystery.
We do have a few details however of the Hawaii rebrands for the 300 series – effectively, these cards are R9 290 series with extra Frame Buffer and a few subtle changes in clock speed (a slight bump, particularly in memory clocks). According to VideoCardz, the names aren’t set in stone as yet, and are being detected as Radeon 300 cards.
The reference R9 290X (known as Hawaii XT)’s 2816 shaders remains untouched for the R9 300 series rebrand, but it’s 1000MHZ core gets a subtle yet appreciated bump to 1050MHZ, and its 4GB VRAM is increased to 8GB. The memory clocks are drastically raised however, pushed to 1500MHZ, up from 1250, providing a rather tasty 384GB/s of memory bandwidth (compared to ‘just’ 320 GB/s); naturally the GPU’s will still be running on a 512-bit bus.
Hawaii Pro (the R9 290) 300 series rebrand features 2560 shaders, but its core is clocked up from 947MHz up to 1010MHz, with its memory configurations exactly the same as above (now 8GB GDDR5 running at 1500MHZ).
This means that the rebrands clearly won’t feature HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) and will stick with the tried-and-tested GDDR5 RAM, which probably isn’t a bad thing – with the increased memory clocks, there should be enough bandwidth to not hold back the GPU. It’s pretty obvious AMD are still sticking to its high resolution target for its GPU’s.
All of this information means that AMD’s cards are getting nice and close – and while the rebrands aren’t as exciting as Fiji, they will be serviceable additions to the lineup – providing they are at the right price.
