AMD Shows Off Dual-GPU Fiji Card At PC Gaming Show
by Ryan Smith on June 17, 2015 8:00 AM EST
Briefly announced and discussed during AMD’s 2015 GPU product presentation yesterday morning was AMD’s forthcoming dual Fiji video card. The near-obligatory counterpart to the just-announced Radeon R9 Fury X, the unnamed dual-GPU card will be taking things one step further with a pair of Fiji GPUs on a single card.
Meanwhile as part of yesterday evening’s AMD-sponsored PC Gaming Show, CEO Dr. Lisa Su took the stage for a few minutes to show off AMD’s recently announced Fury products. And at the end this included the first public showcase of the still in development dual-GPU card.
There’s not too much to say right now since we don’t know its specifications, but of course for the moment AMD is focusing on size. With 4GB of VRAM for each GPU on-package via HBM technology, AMD has been able to design a dual-GPU card that’s shorter and simpler than their previous dual-GPU cards like the R9 295X2 and HD 7990, saving space that would have otherwise been occupied by GDDR5 memory modules and the associated VRMs.
Meanwhile on the card we can see that it uses a PLX 8747 to provide PCIe switching between the two GPUs and the shared PCIe bus. And on the power delivery side the card uses a pair of 8-pin PCIe power sockets. At this time no further details are being released, so we’ll have to see what AMD is up to later on once they’re ready to reveal more about the video card.
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imaheadcase - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Do you happen to have a side by side to compare the size of this memory vs "old"?DanNeely - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Arstechnica has one. I'm not sure which card is the traditional PCB layout; but there hasn't been much variation in the PCB layouts of large single GPU cards for the last half dozen+ generations.http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/site...
phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
The bottom one, with all the memory chips around the GPU, is the "old" layout.The top one is the new layout with the HBM memory on the GPU die.
Not the greatest picture, but you can at least get a sense of the differences in the layouts.
Samus - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
them is crazy looking memory "blocks"Xpl1c1t - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
the memory is on-die, HBM, coming to most gpus next yearFlushedBubblyJock - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
AMD must feel so stupid, their top tier cards have only 4GB ram, so they rebranded the 290X and 290 and overclocked them a tiny bit and put 8gigs on both because 2nd tier cards should have 8GB and top tier cards should have 4...ROFL - Man it must be so embarrassing to work there.
jordanclock - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
They only have 4GBs of RAM because that is a limitation in the current design of HBM. The idea is that while the capacity is lower, the outrageous amounts of bandwidth and power savings will be an offset.WinterCharm - Sunday, June 28, 2015 - link
Wont this be limiting at resolutions above 4K though?MobiusPizza - Tuesday, June 30, 2015 - link
In benchmark we see, not at the moment. Techpowerup writes:"My numbers show that at this time, there is no need for more than 4 GB of VRAM when targeting playable framerates. "
Good thing is, memory usage is optimizable by game devs and drivers, we are currently very wasteful in game memory usage. Like Nvidia, AMD introduced new texture compression algorithmns which should alleviate maxing out the VRAM.
piiman - Saturday, June 27, 2015 - link
" Man it must be so embarrassing to work there."It must be embarrassing to not know what you're talking about also.