We exclusively brought you the first images of AMD's upcoming flagship Radeon graphics card, Fury, featuring HBM and today we're bringing you an exclusive look at the GPU die itself. It's not a render, it's not a reconstruction, this is what FIji looks like in its bare form.
Once the water cooling cold plate is removed you are greeted with a sizable GPU from the red team, what appears to be their largest by far. Along with four High Bandwidth Memory stacks. We're glad to report that the Fiji GPU actually looks identical to the die reconstruction we talked about a week ago. Which was based on various official renders by AMD that showed various parts of Fiji.
Fiji Die Reconstruction By Videocardz
Previously there was talk of AMD actually having to use a heat spreader, much like what Intel uses for Knight's landing, to distribute the heat evenly between the GPU and the HBM stacks. However it's clearly evident that this is not the case. As cooler cold plates will be mounted directly on-die rather than on a heat spreader. Which is good news because direct contact with the die is significantly better for thermals.
AMD's Fiji Powered Radeon Fury - A look inside and Outside
Almost a month ago we brought you an exclusive look at what AMD's flagship water cooled "ultra-enthusiast" Radeon graphics card actually looks like. The same card that is now rumored to be called Fury. Fury isn’t actually an entirely new name. In fact the brand was used a very long time ago by ATi in the Rage era before the debut of the Radeon brand. AMD took over all of ATi’s assets when it acquired the company back in 2008, including its brands. So it’s not implausible to see AMD bring some of these old brand names back.
This graphics card will officially be AMD's and the world's first graphics processor to feature High Bandwidth Memory technology. The next generation JEDEC 3D stacked graphics memory system co-developed by SK Hynix and AMD. We covered this memory technology in detail last year and again when AMD officially announced it last month.
A photo, not a render, of the graphics card was later teased by none other than the most vocal Mantle advocate and the mastermind technical director for EA's Frostbite engine, Johann Andersson. This is the photo that you can see above. However even though it looks exactly as the render by AMD, the photo was cleverly taken in an awkward angle to hide the water cooling setup. Which apparently AMD intends for it to be a surprise for enthusiasts, even though we exclusively reported that it was coming months ago.
Let’s briefly revisit Fiji’s exclusive "secret weapon", High Bandwidth memory.
HBM represents the revolutionary step that has been so badly needed in the evolution of graphics memory standards. The first generation of HBM promises to deliver 4.5X the bandwidth of GDDR5 and a staggering 16 times the bandwidth of DDR3.
The second generation promises to double the bandwidth by doubling the speed from 1Gbps to 2Gbps. While also quadrupling the memory capacity for 4-Hi stacks from 1GB to 4GB. HBM2 will be featured in AMD’s upcoming Arctic Islands graphics architecture with the “Greenland” flagship GPU.
Apart from the bandwidth boost and power savings HBM also offers an additional benefit and that is size. Because High Bandwidth Memory is vertically stacked, it offers much greater densities per mm². So there are immense area savings on the DRAM chips themselves and the printed circuit board as well. Enabling far more compact form factors than before as is evident by the photo of the Fiji board that was teased on twitter.
Below are the specifications for Fiji based on the SiSoft Sandra database leak that surfaced many moons ago.
WCCFTech | AMD Radeon Fury X | AMD Radeon Fury | AMD Radeon R9 390X | AMD Radeon R9 290X |
---|---|---|---|---|
GPU Code Name | Fiji XT | Fiji PRO | Hawaii XT | Hawaii XT |
GPU Cores / Shaders | 4096 | TBD | 2816 | 2816 |
Memory | 4GB Stacked HBM | 4GB Stacked HBM | 8GB GDDR5 | 4GB GDDR5 |
Memory Frequency | 1.0Ghz | 1.0Ghz | 6.0Ghz | 5.0Ghz |
Memory Interface | 4096 Wide IO | 4096 Wide IO | 512bit GDDR5 | 512bit GDDR5 |
Total Memory Bandwidth | 512GB/S | 512GB/S | 384GB/S | 320GB/S |
GPU Clock Speed | 1.05Ghz | TBD | 1.05Ghz | 1Ghz |
Compute Performance | 8.5TFLOPS* | TBD | 5.9TFLOPS* | 5.6TFLOPS |
Launch Price | TBD | TBD | TBD | $549 |
We've got news that the launch date for Fiji will be the 24th of June, exactly 12 days after E3 kicks off. The rest of the 300 series will launch on June 18th a week prior to Fiji XT. These launch dates are not official by any means but we have reason to believe that they're reasonably accurate. In the meantime stay tuned as we bring you more coverage of Fiji and the rest of the 300 series lineup.