With AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) Radeon R9 300 series launch under a month away, details are starting to emerge as to the architecture and the hardware that will power the cards. The latest leak suggests that the vendor will offer the Fiji XT — the new silicon rumored to power the R9 390X — in two versions, an air-cooled variant and a water-cooled edition. The air-cooled edition will be similar to high-end AMD cards we’ve seen previously, but the water-cooled card is said to feature a short PCB, one that is as small as that of Nvidia’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) reference GTX 970.
AMD’s utilization of High Bandwidth Memory, which is three times as fast as existing memory, is said to be the main factor in the reduction in the PCB of the water-cooled Fiji XT. Instead of the memory modules surrounding the GPU, with HBM, AMD can stack the memory atop the silicon. The Fiji XT-enabled R9 390X is said to feature 8GB video memory, GCN 1.2 architecture, 4,096 stream processors, 256 TMUs, 128 ROPs, and a 4096-bit wide interface resulting in a total bandwidth of 640GB/s.
The chip vendor is also allegedly getting rid of DVI connectors for the upcoming R9 300 series, instead going with three DisplayPort ports and one HDMI 2.0 port. Similar to the R9 295X2, the R9 390X will come factory-fitted with a 120x120mm radiator, while the air-cooled variant will be slightly longer to accommodate the cooling stack on the card. The cards will be revealed at Computex, and may be available in retail stores by end of June to accommodate this year’s back-to-school season. The R9 390X will be an entirely new offering, but the other cards in the series are said to be re-branded editions of current-gen models, with AMD looking to retake the market share lost after the introduction of the GTX 900 series.
