AMD Teases Forthcoming Dual-GPU Video Card
by Ryan Smith on March 13, 2014 7:45 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 200
It looks like AMD is starting up another one of their tongue-in-cheek video card marketing campaigns, if the latest package to arrive on my doorstep is any indication.
In an envelope from AMD’s marketing department labeled “Top Secret”, AMD included in a single picture (of myself) with the text “Wouldn’t you agree that two is better than one?” On the backside is a Twitter hashtag, #2betterthan1.
Given the current state of AMD’s 200 series product lineup and the fact that it has been just under a year since the Radeon 7990 launched, this is presumably the start of AMD’s marketing campaign for the obligatory dual-GPU 200 series card. AMD’s note doesn’t leave much in the way of details to speculate with, but considering that 7990 was already pushing around a pair of Tahiti GPUs, it seems a foregone conclusion that any new dual-GPU card would be Hawaii based. In which case, considering that Hawaii cards currently approach 300W, it will be interesting to see just what AMD has up their sleeve for fitting a pair of their best GPUs on a single card.
One thing is for certain: AMD never stops with one teaser. So no doubt there will be more information to follow.
In the meantime, to see whether two really is better than one, I made a quick call to the ultimate authority on all things me: my mother. Her response? “Having two sons was great for getting the yard work done, but I paid for it at the grocery store.” So make of that what you will.
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JDG1980 - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
I'd like to see a quad-Pitcairn card targeted at miners with a price point around $500-$750. Pitcairn has the best KH/$ ratio, and four chips could push 1600-2000 KH/sec, which would get the miners to leave the gaming cards alone.ImSpartacus - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
AMD is selling plenty of gaming cards right now, so why cannibalize their sales with an R&D-intensive SKU that's only usable to one slice of their users?The Von Matrices - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
It's also worth noting that part of the allure of cards to miners is that they can be resold as gaming cards as the difficulty increases or if the market tanks. A specialized SKU would lose all its resale value in these scenarios, so it would have to be very attractively priced to appeal to miners.jasonelmore - Saturday, March 15, 2014 - link
this guy knows what he's talkin about. Nobody wants a outdated, less efficient mining card. With mining, its GO FAST or GO BROKE. Litecoin and maybe dougecoin is the only reason GPU's are still being used.mikato - Monday, March 17, 2014 - link
You'll notice in ebay auctions that people are often stating a video card wasn't used for cryptocoin mining. This may become a common thing, but I guess there may be people who don't think to ask and don't consider it so they can still sell for close to a market price. However less potential buyers may mean lower resale price and I think people that are up on their hardware news will want to know.The Von Matrices - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
I don't see why AMD would need to do this. The type of R&D needed would be something easily achievable by the individual vendors like what ASUS does with its dual GPU solutions.xaml - Thursday, March 13, 2014 - link
Gamers might fight back, metaphorically, by C4-ing the pillars of the mines of such criminal virtual currencies.allknowingeye - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Any who is spending money on GPU's for mining is well pretty clueless. Custom ASIC's are where the scene is at, from the same price you get ten times the hashing performance or more than a GPU with significantly less power usage. The best a 290x can do is about 1.1 Ghash where a $250 Custom Asic box you can plug into a USB port can do up to 7Ghash. And to make a profit you really need to be doing a lot more Ghashing than that. The difficulty factor has increased to the point that a Gpu is not going to produce much of anything, and will likely not even pay for the power consumed.JDG1980 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
If you're talking about gigahashes, you're talking about Bitcoin (and other SHA-256 cryptocurrencies). Everyone knows these are purely the realm of ASICs now, and have been for some time. The GPU miners usually go for Litecoin, Dogecoin, or other Scrypt-based cryptocurrencies, which are more ASIC-resistant since they have substantial requirements for low-latency RAM. There are some ASICs out there, but the ones released so far are underwhelming: a unit with five Gridseed chips costs about $250-$300 and generates about 350 KH/sec at most, whereas a $149 R7 265 card can get 420+ KH/sec if tuned properly. The Gridseed ASICs do have much lower power consumption, but not enough to offset that substantial price difference (even when you factor in overhead for motherboards, PSUs, etc.)ol1bit - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link
LOL, money for nothing....I think that is a song. :-P