14 DAY TRIAL // There is such a thing as too much information, but there is also the opposite situation, when there isn't nearly enough. This was the case for AMD's Fiji graphics processing unit for a long time, but that is steadily changing.
About a week ago, it came to our attention that the first graphics card based on the Fiji would use high-bandwidth stacked DRAM.
It still wasn't clear whether we were talking about the Radeon R9 380X or the R9 390X, however, and beyond the TDP of 300W we didn't know much else. Save perhaps the memory clock of 1.25 GHz (5 GHz effective).
Now, some more information has finally appeared on the Fiji-based video boards, or one of them. The Radeon R9 380X.
Radeon R9 380X graphics card
This chip has a graphics processing unit with 4,096 Stream processors according to SweClockers website. A strong suggestion that the board is not the best Fiji model, even though it bears the Fiji XT name.
Since other reports in the past said that the processor had 4,224 Graphics Core Next processors, we can assume that the R9 390X will possess a fully unlocked version of the GPU.
4 GB of high bandwidth memory are backing up the GPU, with a clock of 1.25 GHz. That would suggest an effective frequency of 5 GHz, but we might just have to do away with these naming conventions, as stacked High Bandwidth memory is supposed to be 9 times faster than GDDR5.
Between that and the presumed GPU clock, at least in boost mode, of 1 GHz, the bandwidth should be of 640GB/s. Twice as good as the 320 GB/s permitted by the Radeon R9 290X.
The performance improvement won't be as massive, but it will still be a rather huge 45% compared to that board, which happens to be the existing AMD single-GPU flagship.
If an R9 390X does exist, we can only wonder how much better that thing is compared to everything on the market right now. Maybe AMD is keeping it in reserve, and for good reason.
Availability and pricing
Keep in mind that we can't confirm the Radeon R9 380X name, or even that it and the R9 390X are different boards. Maybe AMD is only preparing one or the other.
What is, however, certain is that AMD has the Fiji XT top-tier graphics processing unit more or less ready to debut, something that will happen in the next few months, probably in the second quarter of the year (Q2 2015).