AMD’s new Radeon R9 300 series of graphics cards will be one of the new hardware products that we will see this year. The new line is expected by the end of June 2015 but surprisingly enough it may bring a single new GPU only to the table despite all expectations. The rest of the line is likely to feature GPUs that are refined versions of what AMD offers now.
The only new GPU will be the so called “Fiji”, which will be used in AMD’s high-end single and dual-GPU cards and will directly compete with NVIDIA’s GM200 GPU and the GeForce GTX Titan-X that it will debut with. The chip is reported to come with 4096 GCN 1.3 stream processors, 256 TMUs, 128 ROPs, and a 1024-bit HBM memory interface to 4 GB of GDDR5 memory that will offer the amazing 640 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The chip will be used in the upcoming Radeon R9 390, R9 390X and R9 390X2 graphics cards.
The rest of the Radeon R9 300 series will be less exciting. The high-end Radeon R9 380X and Radeon R9 380 graphics cards will get a “new” GPU codenamed “Grenada”. The chip will be built on the well-known 28 nm production process and will compete directly with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 video cards. Grenada happens to be a refined version of the Hawaii GPU just like Curacao was to Pitcairn a while ago. Thus the “new” GPU is expected to bring the same specs as Hawaii, which happen to be 2816 GCN stream processors, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs and a 512-bit memory bus that will serve 4 GB of GDDR5 memory. The key to the performance benefits that Grenada will bring will be hidden in – you guessed it – higher clock speeds. Unfortunately with the older technology under the hood Grenada will likely not bring lower power consumption, which means we are set to see some exotic cooling solutions on cards that use the Grenada chip.
The rest of the Radeon R9 300 series is likely to use previous generation GPUs. Thus the Radeon R9 370 may have “Tonga” GPUs with 2048 stream processors on the more advanced GCN 1.3 architecture, 128 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 384-bit memory interface. The GPU will be used in the future Radeon R9 370X graphics card too, which will likely have 3 GB of on-board GDDR5 memory just like the R9 370.
The new Radeon R9 300 line is expected any time soon.
Source: News.Softpedia.com