AMD Info! HBM-equipped Radeon this quarter! Zen CPU architecture in 2016

[JEMC]

Solid-Stark said:

JEMC said:

More news and rumors about Fiji.

What was only a rumor, although that seemed legit, has now been proven correct. A leaked driver has confirmed the rebranding of some R9 2XX series cards to the new 3XX series. The R9 285, 290 and 290X will come back

That's not surprising, and it's not even bad news as they could simply be rebranded as the R9 370, 380 and 380X.

The problem comes from the ASUS forums (although I still have to see a link that proves it), that has listed new cards, including:

• ASUS R9390X-DC2-8GD5
• ASUC-2GD5S  STRIX-R9380-O
• ASUS  STRIX-R9370-OC-4GD5
• ASUS  STRIX-R7360X-DC2OC2-2GD5
• ASUS  R7360-2GD5

If 390X is Fiji, and Fiji only has 4GB of HBM, how can they list an 8GB variant? Well, it could be that the 390X is Hawaii based like the 290X, not Fiji, and because of that, it will ship with 8GB of GDDR5. Meanehile, the Fiji cards with HBM will have a special name and will compete with TitanX.

Am I reading this correctly? The 260x, 270, 270x, 285, 290, and 290x are getting rebrands. 

So we have,

 

• 7790 to 260x to 360
• (7870) to 270 to 3xx
• (7870) to 270x to 370
• (7950) to 285 to 3xx
• 290 to 3xx
• 290x to 3xx

AMD is really keeping those 2012 cards alive. You guys follow this better than me, but I'd guess that the 270 becomes 360x, 285 becomes 370x, and the 290 and 290x become the 380 and 380x, respectively. Which means the new 390 and 390x cards will be the HBM equipped cards. Is 8GB HBM unlikely? Earlier rumors suggested them to be pricey.

 

Just a little correction, the HD 7950 went to be the R9 280, not the 285.

The 7950 and 7970 were based of Tahiti, which was the first iteration of AMD's Graphics Core Next or GCN. Then came GCN1.1 which was Hawaii and came in the form of the 290 and 290X, and then came GCN1.2 which was Tonga with the 285.

On the 8GB HBM thing... yes, it's very unlikely. It is known that the first iteration of HBM comes in packages of 1GB, and since all the diagrams showed by AMD had only 4 packages, many sites guessed that 4Gb would be the limit.

Later, AMD's Joe Macri said that until now there had been a lack of optimization when it came to the use of memory because with GDDR5 they always worked with more than enough VRAM, but that now they had been working on ways to optimize how the card deals with it with "surprising results". Obviously, AMD wouldn't have to optimize that memory usage unless they went short of it, so the 4GB has been all but confirmed.

What still has to be confirmed is if those optimizations have worked and how "only" having 4GB will impact their performance.

Price is still a mistery, but big chip+new memory+liquid cooling... well, I doubt it will come cheaper than a reference GTX 980.