14 DAY TRIAL // The Tonga graphics processing unit has already been used on the Radeon R9 285 graphics card, but with the cancellation of the R9 285X, or whatever the higher-end Tonga board was supposed to be called, we couldn't know what to expect from the fully unlocked GPU.
Not all chips come out perfectly fine from the assembly line, and the Tonga GPU used in the Radeon R9 285 graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices is an example of that.
Many of the below-high-end GPUs, like CPUs for that matter, are nerfed versions of the flagship that would have had to be scrapped if not for the existence of lower-price product options.
Fortunately, it's easy enough to isolate the faulty parts of a chip and have the final product do a good, sometimes excellent job.
Now, though, we might have finally learned at least part of what can be offered by the Tonga GPUs that did come out perfectly fine from the fabrication factory.
The Tonga GPU specifications
They aren't really known yet, at least not in entirety, and even the information that does exist only came to light thanks to the folks at PC Watch.
The Radeon R9 285 graphics card, which has been around for a while but was only released in India the other day, was accompanied by a leak about the complete graphics processor.
The Full Tonga is supposed to pack 32 compute units, meaning 2,048 Stream Processors, making it very similar to the Tahiti AMD GPU.
Moreover, the chip is meant to possess a GDDR5 VRAM memory bus of 384 bits. This is the newest bit of information in fact. The width is owed to the existence of six 64-bit wide memory controllers.
Moving on, the AMD Tonga XT (or whatever it will be called) is supposed to be HSA-compatible (heterogeneous system architecture) and feature integrated GPU Compute Context Switch and GPU Graphics Preemption.
In layman's terms, it means that a PC will be able to distribute and use both CPU and GPU resources at optimum effectiveness.
The AMD Radeon R9 285X
Unfortunately, we can't easily speculate on the capabilities of the Radeon R9 285X graphics card, especially with the reports of it having been canceled. One educated guess can still be made though: the chip should have 48 ROPs instead of 32.
If it does come out, whenever this happens, it should be able to match the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 at the very least.