A recent tweet by EA’s Johan Andersson shows off AMD’s new Fiji XT chipset product – unofficially titled the Radeon R9 390X. Andersson is one of the masterminds behind the Frostbite engine, so it makes sense why AMD would provide him with this sweet hookup.
— Johan Andersson (@repi) May 22, 2015
The inbuilt water cooling blocks and HBM memory design look to the key features of this beast. It’s not clear at this time whether AMD will ship every single one of its new generation graphics cards with the water block and radiator (which would be a waste for those with already impressive WC loops and problematic for those with small cases) but it is looking like AMD has something special up its sleeve.
While the cooling used by the Radeons is not confirmed, we know that they will feature an impressive new memory configuration. The flagship Fiji XT chips are going to have 4GB of memory on board. They will be using High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which is stacked vertically, saving space on the PCB and reducing power requirements.
HBM also makes it possible to locate the memory far closer to the GPU core, which should in theory equate to lower latency and better performance. The bandwidth offered by the new memory type could be as much as three times that of comparably sized GDDR5 set ups.
Recently leaked benchmarks for the card and it’s competitors seems to confirm that this new generation of cards would be a massive leap forward in terms of performance. Although those same benchmarks show Fiji XT as being quite a power hog, consuming nearly 300W under load.
These new cards look both seriously cool, and seriously damaging to the wallet, lets hop AMD makes it all worth it in the end.