AMD Hawaii GPU Die Shot Analyzed

NVIDIA’s mammoth GK110 Kepler core faced head on competition from the AMD’s flagship Hawaii GPU which was launched a few months back. The Hawaii GPU has given some intense competition with its higher levels of performance which are offered at great value. So far, the Hawaii chip has had two variants which had been included in the AMD’s Volcanic Islands GPU lineup.

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The Hawaii XT core comes along with the Radeon R9 290X and features 2816 stream processors where as on the other hand the Hawaii Pro core comes with 2560 stream processors and has been featured on the Radeon R9 290. It might come as a little surprise that the graphics cards based on the Hawaii architecture are the only ones in the lineup which have a new core. All the other chips are more like the rebrands of older GPUs such as the Cape Verde, Oland, Bonaire, Pitcairn and Tahiti. The current flagship Hawaii chip of AMD is the Radeon R9 290X and it was of the view that the Hawaii XT core which was featured on this card was a fully unlocked variant which had 2816 stream processors, 172 TMUs and 64 ROPs. But the inside truth was revealed by a slide posted by DG’s Nerdy Story which says that the Hawaii chip has so much more to offer than just this. The chip inside the Radeon R9 290X has 4 Compute Units disabled and this clearly shows that the full fledged chip is yet to be launched and we just haven’t seen it in full form as yet.

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The fully enabled Hawaii GPU is composed of 48 Compute Units (which are equivalent to 3072 stream processors), 192 Texture Mapping Units and 64 Raster Operators. The AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 dual-chip graphics card and NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 690 dual-chip card also feature this same amount of cores. The comparison of these cores is not so realistic after all because all the cards are based on different forms of architectures but still this point was noteworthy that such a vast number of cores had been featured on the flagship chip of AMD.

Source: DG’s Nerdy Story | News Archive