When AMD announced the R9 Nano we first heard “later this summer”, and then during AMD’s quarterly conference call AMD CEO Lisa Su told investors that “we will be launching Nano in the August timeframe”. Now it has been reported that the AMD Radeon R9 Nano has started shipping to retailers and even more is that a Korean Blog has their hands on a card already.
The AMD Radeon R9 Nano was the card that I was most excited about when AMD first showed off the card back in June. AMD has stated that users could expect 2x performance per watt compared to the Radeon R9 290X. Since the R9 Fury X achieved around 1.5x performance per watt, we expect that the Nano would offer similar performance to the Radeon R9 290X at around half of the power draw. Currently all we know about the card is what AMD released in the below slide.
The Korean Blog in question has expanded this with the release of what looks to be footnotes from an official AMD slide. These notes detail PC systems which are running the Unigine Heaven Benchmark in 4K (3840×2160 resolution, extreme present, 0xAA). According to the text, the Nano has an efficiency of 0.152 fps/Watt in the 4K benchmark, whereas the R9 290X has an efficiency of 0.076 fps/Watt. A simple calculation (0.152 x 175) provides the following frame rate score for the Nano: 26.6fps.
The R9 Nano is expected to be powered by a Fiji XT chip just like the Fury X. It has been suggested that the card is clock around 850 MHz for use in the smaller card.
Source: Hexus | News Archive
