There’s been a bunch of rumors concerning AMD’s 300 series GPU, but easily the most consistent is the 390X will sport High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Early reports indicated that the card would boast only 4GB, but a few rumors have since surfaced we’d see an 8GB version of the GPU.
Recently, BitsandChips.it have cited an ‘internal source’ which the publication claims, says AMD will indeed be presenting the Radeon R9 390X with 8GB of RAM. It will do this by utilizing a SK Hynix technology known as Dual Link Interposer, which allows the GPU to stack up to 8GB of RAM, and effectively bypass the first generation of HBM limit of only 4GB.
The 4GB limit of the first generation of HBM has been a concern for many in the tech industry, because despite the massive bandwidth, 4GB will likely be insufficient for next generation games, particularly in 4K (or even higher). SK Hynix (and AMD) will supposedly get around this by stacking four dual 1GB HBM modules via means of an interposer (the 2.5D die) – more info here.
When the second generation of High Bandwidth Memory finally ships from SK Hynix, AMD should easily and simply be able to shift to the new design.
The Fiji XT, AKA Radeon R9 390X will supposedly be making its debut at Computex, which runs until the from the 2nd to 6th June, 2015.
Moving away from the R9 390X, let’s talk about Fiji VR. Which is a dual-GPU designed to power Virtual Reality headsets. It would make a degree of sense if you think about it – considering AMD are pushing their Liquid VR technology. Naturally, the Liquid VR technology also heavily pushes the Asynchronous Shaders, which AMD state provides a massive increase in performance on GCN hardware.
If it’s accurate, the Fiji VR will put out about 17 TFLOPS of computing power, compared to the R9 390X’s 8.6 TFLOPS (if the rumors of 4,096 Stream processors running at 1050MHZ are to be believed). With the R9 390X, the GPU should hit a memory bandwidth of about 640GB/s of bandwidth, which isn’t too bad, right?
Naturally, how accurate any of actually is remains a mystery – but judging from the leaked slides, LinkedIn profiles and industry whispers a good portion of the rumors might well be pretty accurate.
If so, gamer’s will be in for a treat – and it’ll be curious indeed how Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti manages to stack up against the Fiji’s.
*UPDATE* – AMD have confirmed the Fiji 390X will use High Bandwidth Memory!
