14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday we brought you the closest thing to a confirmation that Advanced Micro Devices was more or less done with the Radeon R9 300 series graphics cards. Now, we have a follow-up that implies there is more than one card.
Admittedly, this was a given. No video card series was ever composed of a single product. Not in AMD's case and not in NVIDIA's either.
However, odds were quite high that the Sunnyvale, California-based company would only release one product to start with, much like NVIDIA did with the GTX 750/750 Ti back in early 2014, to introduce the Maxwell GPU series.
However, the latest exchange between an interested aussie and AMD on Facebook (thanks to Gav for the tip again) clearly shows the company mentioning “them.”
Both the Radeon R9 390X and the R9 380X will debut
This is the best assumption we can make based on everything that has come to light so far. Advanced Micro Devices could use the Fiji XT in the R9 390X and a cut-down Fiji for the R9 380X.
Alternatively, the R9 390X could be the only one with a new GPU, while the R9 380X is powered by an enhanced Hawaii XTX with 2816/3072 GCN stream processors (rebranded R9 280X).
Similarly, the Radeon R9 280 could become R9 380, R9 270X could be rebranded into R9 360X, and so on and so forth.
In any event, the Fiji XT will definitely be stronger than all of them, with its 4,096 GCN cores (graphics core-next stream processors), 4,096 bit-wide I/O (we're not quite sure about this one, huge number that it is).
The clock of the GPU will be of around 1 GHz, with plenty of room for buyers to manually overclock the (un)living stuffing out of it.
AMD can't wait to reveal the cards
The company officials appear to be quite excited about this. They did not say when the launch would happen, but previous reports pegged a product launch in the second quarter of 2014. Whether it happens in March or April remains to be seen, but we don't have too long to wait now.
Obviously, the rumor should not be taken as gospel, especially since the exchange is oddly absent from Facebook. But the one we got wind of yesterday did finally emerge on the site, so we're quite optimistic.
