14 DAY TRIAL // Hwbattle.com, a South-Korean tech publication, claims that AMD will be launching its next HBM-based GPU Fiji chips in three fully fledged flavors: the Fury PRO, the Fury XT and the Fury Nano.
The three classes will have combined water- and air-cooled systems. Fury Nano will probably be water-cooled while the PRO and XT will probably be air-cooled. It’s believed that the XT version will come as the "cheap," stripped-down version of the Fiji chip.
The XT and the Nano are believed to be designed to compete with the same chip as they will offer cons and pros specific to each of them, while their architecture and specs will have different clock speeds and cooling systems.
Issues at launch
Hwbattle.com has also mentioned that the initial batch of HBM cards will be extremely limited thanks to problems into the AMD supply chain. As this is extremely new tech, it is to be expected when it's said to hit the market in August or September. It'll probably take two or three months before enough numbers of HBM cards would turn the Fury into a profitable new machine.
Pricing, however, is rumored to be around $899 (&euro807) which will be subject to change based on the GTX 980 Ti’s performance levels.
This strategy is meant by AMD to offer more affordable graphic cards, undercutting Nvidia on everything except 980Ti and Titan X, while the "Furies" will handle the top tiers. How will they do this is unknown as The Fury XT and Nano will probably come with stacked 4GB while 980Ti and Titan X already come with 6GB and 12GB respectively.
It's quite possible that only user experience and actual cards performance will tell which one is better. Thanks to better energy and thermal efficiency, 4GB of HBM memory might fare better that classically laid out 6GB.
However, any sort of speculation will soon become redundant as we'll see all there is to see about AMD's next technology bargain on June 16. E3 is coming in hot, and Nvidia and AMD will most certainly want to trade shots with each other on next-gen GPUs on this occasion. Most likely AMD will steal the show this year, showing us what future tech really looks like.