Well that did not take long at all! AMD just announced the first cards in its new R9 300 series, but as we pointed out these were all rebrands of current cards, so nothing new. Now two new teaser photos have appeared showing the liquid cooled AMD R9 390X!
Taking a look at the first teaser image we can see something that looks quite different than even the hybrid and liquid cooled versions of AMD cards in the past. There is no fan on this card at all and it appears to be 100% liquid-cooled with a 120mm radiator being shown in the background.
AMD is moving away from DVI and the card will feature three DisplayPort 1.2a connectors and a single HDMI 2.0a.
The second shot gives us a better look at the card and the thing you really notice is that the PCB on the card is quite short (think GTX 970 reference). The shorter PCB is made possible because of AMD’s implementation of HBM, which we talked about already today. The 8GB of HBM actually sits on the GPU package as bare 3D-stacked DRAM dies that surround the GPU die with an IHS covering everything. This is different from what we are used to with a GPU package being surrounded by memory chips.
The specifications of the card so far include 4096 GCN 1.2 stream processors, 256 TMUs, 128 ROPs, and a 4096-bit wide HBM interface, which at its 1.25 GHz memory clock will offer a bandwidth of 640 GB/s. This single GPU solution could offer performance comparable to the dual-GPU R9 295X2, which is faster than NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan X.
The upcoming R9 390X will ship with two SKUs. One will be the liquid cooled that we showed you above and the second will be an air-cooled version that will have a longer PCB and a lateral blower and heatsink. AMD CEO Lisa Su hinted that these cards could launch around Computex 2015 in early June.
Source: eTeknix, Chiphell | News Archive
