This is something we as consumers have been becoming more and more accustomed to, graphics card companies releasing a new graphics card made with an older graphics processor. Both AMD and NVIDIA are guilty of this. One of the clearest examples of this is the current Radeon R9 Series, which really only had Hawaii that was new and then later Tonga. The rest of the series is older GPUs that have been rebranded.
According to a report from vBulletin Solutions it has not been more or less confirmed that AMD plans to do the exact same thing with the upcoming Radeon R300 series. The flagship cards will be equipped with the new GPU “Fiji” while everything else will be a rebrand. So we will see everything from Hawaii to Tonga down to Bonaire.
AMD’s Fiji GPU is based on the companies Graphics Core Next 1.3 architecture and will be the first to use stacked or High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). The card will have 4 GB of memory from SK Hynix that has an aggregate bandwidth up of to 640 GB/s, which is twice as much as the current Radeon R9 290X.
Other rumors have suggested that Fiji will get the full 4096 stream processors, that is about 45 percent more than Hawaii. AMD is expected to launch Fiji and the Radeon R300 in the second quarter of this year, most likely in connection with Computex which takes place June 1-6.
Source: Sweclockers | News Archive
