Monday, June 15th 2015
Radeon R9 390X Taken Apart, PCB Reveals a Complete Re-brand
People with access to an XFX Radeon R9 390X graphics card, took it apart to take a peek at its PCB. What they uncovered comes as no surprise - the underlying PCB is identical in design to AMD reference PCB for the Radeon R9 290X, down the location of every tiny SMT component. At best, the brands on the chokes and bigger conductive polymer caps differ; and 512 Gbit GDDR5 chips under the heatspreader, making up 8 GB of the standard memory amount. The GPU itself, codenamed "Grenada," looks identical to the "Hawaii" silicon which drove the R9 290 series. It's highly unlikely that it features updated Graphics CoreNext 1.2 stream processors, as older rumors suggested.
Sources:
1, 2
89 Comments on Radeon R9 390X Taken Apart, PCB Reveals a Complete Re-brand
For me enthusiast level has to be something insane like Titan-X, Titan-Z and so on... Horrendously overpriced for only a little gain in performance. The best of the best if you will. That doesn't even include 980-Ti. This is high end and so hopefully will be Fury. :)
At least you get 8GB framebuffer for the same price instead of the 3.5GB on a GTX-970... :)
I wonder for how much more they'll charge those extra 4GB of VRAM...
sorry, can't resist xD
I'd buy 390X 8GB though if they sell below 970 price. In my place 290X is more expensive than 970 too.
Seen it coming since the R9 290X release and knowing its power signature to be honest. They were already at board power limits pretty much. The only reason Nvidia is taking 28nm further than AMD is because of Maxwell. A good move (again) versus a complete standstill at AMD. Tonga optimizations are not even ported to R9 290X or they are already in there which only goes to show the tremendous power hog it is. AMD's stance on performance has just been wrong ever since they kept scaling up the 7970.
Besides, I'm also from Europe (Germany to be exact) and here pricing for a R9-290X is almost identical to a GTX-970 (~320€).
If nVidia would rebrand their original Titan Black to a Titan Light and offered it for let's say $300 or less, I probably might consider getting one (or two) of those... :cool:
I know this sounds pathetic, but it may be more important than ever to buy their shit now just to help them survive...
...or maybe we can depend on some newcomer to make a GPU... hur hur. I'm looking at you, SiS. Aren't they still around?
If a company makes shitty products, or no longer improves its product lines, why would it have any right to survive in a competitive market? Goodwill, surviving on the pockets of its customers who get subpar products in return??? If anything, those customers are just supporting AMDs standstill, but not its survival. A company like this simply cannot survive without design wins. And AMDs last design win was a decade ago...
Honestly if AMD fails to impress, another company will take its place. x86 is big enough, someone will simply take over the company for its patents and technologies and continue onwards.
As far as the 'beautiful' philosophy of AMD for open-source and market standardization, I would brand it as utopian and surreal. It hasn't worked, it may work for FreeSync, but it won't work for AMD in terms of profit. Profit = survival. Lack of profit = inevitable death.
Samsung can't buy AMD fast enough... but at this rate, why would they want to?
All of the above can be profitable business. Also: size. Samsung thrives on controlling markets through its overwhelming capacity in production, R&D, marketing. The success of the Galaxy phones is a simple example of that. They just pound the market with six thousand models and something is bound to succeed.