There are new developments in the AMD graphics camp that are more than interesting so we decided they deserved an article. So here it is – AMD plans to present the new so-called Pirate Islands GPU family in early 2015.
The reasons for the upcoming product launch are a few – first tough competition on behalf of NVIDIA that now has high-performance Maxwell cards in the form of the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 and more are to follow soon. Second – power efficiency where AMD lags behind and third – the current 28 nm tech process that is definitely getting long in the tooth.
The launch of Pirate Islands should take care of all this – the new GPUs will be built on 20 nm tech process that will lower the power consumption and solve the 28 nm tech process issue while offering increased performance and several new features. Reportedly, the first member of the Pirate Islands family will be the Radeon R9 380X, which will be a mid- to high-end card and will have the so-called Fiji GPU. A more powerful version of this card is known as Bermuda; it will retire the Radeon R9 290X. Cheaper and less powerful alternatives will be known at first as Radeon R9 370X and more will follow after that under the Treasure Island codename. All these cards will come much later as in Q1 2015 only Fiji will be released to market. In addition to all this the Radeon R9 3xx representatives will have support for DisplayPort 1.3 and HDMI 2.0.
The new market situation has also prompted AMD to cancel the expected Radeon R9 285X graphics card, a product, which we reported of a few days ago. Apparently AMD does not see much sense now in launching such a card and in addition to that it wants to focus more on the upcoming Pirate Islands family rather than on something else.
Source: VR-Zone.com