14 DAY TRIAL // With all the hype running around about the product brief that Advanced Micro Devices is going to hold tomorrow (August 23, 2014), many people, us included, thought that the Radeon R9 285 graphics card would finally be launched. Alas, this is not the case.
Well, it's not exactly the case anyway. You see, Advanced Micro Devices will unveil some details about the graphics card, but not actually release the thing.
Instead, it is holding off on shipping the product until September. The second day of September to be exact, which to us will be the Tuesday after the next. So we guess that we'll only suffer a teaser tomorrow.
At least, we can already guess some of what will be available on the card. After all, there have been plenty of reports and rumors about it, and the GPU powering it.
Called Tonga, or at least that is its codename, the 28nm processor has 2,048 stream processors, Graphics CoreNext chips to be exact, or GCN for short.
Not all those cores will be active on the Radeon R9 285 though, from what we can gather. Which is a shame, because 2,048 is a pretty cool number.
On that note, the 128 TMUs (texture mapping units) and 32 ROPs (raster operating units) might not all be active either.
Fortunately, the 256-bit memory interface will be ready and willing to manage 2 GB or 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
We're not sure if AMD will go for one or the other, or if it means to launch both. Most likely it will go with 2 GB, and leave it to its OEMs to customize the adapter with more memory and whatever else.
Unfortunately, we can't even begin to guess what AMD means by saying it will reveal “partial” details about the card tomorrow. On the one hand, it could mean that the company will only confirm Tonga's use and hand out some benchmarks.
On the other hand, August 23 is supposed to be an anniversary event for the company's involvement in the graphics market. The thirtieth birthday, in a sense, so it will have to provide something for the world to gush over. Maybe a comparison to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 760 or something.