14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices probably didn't plan to launch its dual-chip graphics adapters this month or the next, maybe not even this quarter, but NVIDIA pushed its hand, so now we're getting actual teasers.
Granted, there were a pair of teasers before, but those were just water bottles and small cards bearing the “Two is Better than One” slogan.
Not exactly the kind of thing that tells us anything about the product and what we can expect from it, or whatever OEM versions are on the way.
Now, though, we at least have a rough estimate of what it will look like, thanks to a deliberately spartan picture.
Then again, diagram might be a better name for it, since it's barely more than a few grey-white lines on a black background.
We can see that the cooler will have a fan set at the center of the board, which is not so different from NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan Z.
That's pretty much all we know right now, save for what can be deduced from the obvious use of the Hawaii XT graphics processing units.
Since we have two chips working in tandem, there are 5,362 cores (2x 2,816 stream processors), 352 texture mapping units (2 x 172), and 128 ROPs (2 x 64).
The memory capacity should be of 8 GB, since the Radeon R9 290X has 4 GB, but with Sapphire's 8 GB boards coming in, we may end up with a 16 GB card.
It will one-up NVIDIA's rather ludicrous 12 GB GeForce GTX Titan Z if that is the case, even though both 12 GB and 16 GB are a bit overkill.
The price is the final thing that could worry us, since NVIDIA has raised the bar on that so much that AMD could easily do the same and not cripple its selling chances overmuch, simply by having a cheaper board on sale.
Normally, dual-GPU video cards sell for around a thousand dollars or Euro, but NVIDIA's dual-GK110 GeForce GTX Titan Z has a tag of $3,000 / €3,000, so Advanced Micro Devices would probably score sales as long as it stays slightly below that mark. Especially if it doesn't install overmuch GDDR5.
Then again, the cooler of the Radeon R9 290 X2 is supposed to be a hybrid, a merger between a radiator and a fansink. It can air-cool the board but can be connected to a water cooling system as well. Knowing that, maybe the PCB and chips on it really will be beyond overkill and, thus, hot and many.