Friday, July 10th 2015
AMD Announces the Radeon R9 Fury Graphics Card
AMD announced the second graphics card based on its swanky new "Fiji" silicon, the Radeon R9 Fury. Positioned between the R9 390X and the R9 Fury X, this card offers higher pixel-crunching muscle than the R9 390X, while giving you cutting-edge 4 GB HBM memory. It can play any game at 2560 x 1440, and at Ultra HD (3840 x 2160), with reasonable eye-candy. The R9 Fury is designed solely for AMD's AIB partners to come up with their own air-cooled products.
AMD carved the R9 Fury out of the Fiji silicon, by enabling 56 of the 64 GCN compute units physically present, yielding 3,584 stream processors. Other specifications include 224 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and 4 GB of memory across a 4096-bit wide HBM interface. The core is clocked at 1000 MHz, and the memory at 500 MHz (512 GB/s). Custom-design boards will offer factory-overclocked speeds. AMD is pricing the R9 Fury at US $549.
AMD carved the R9 Fury out of the Fiji silicon, by enabling 56 of the 64 GCN compute units physically present, yielding 3,584 stream processors. Other specifications include 224 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and 4 GB of memory across a 4096-bit wide HBM interface. The core is clocked at 1000 MHz, and the memory at 500 MHz (512 GB/s). Custom-design boards will offer factory-overclocked speeds. AMD is pricing the R9 Fury at US $549.
56 Comments on AMD Announces the Radeon R9 Fury Graphics Card
Yes, HBM is more energy efficient than GDDR5, we know that. Here is a pretty interesting read, I think it might actually be the first write-up of HBM. Look at the chart at the beginning, ~20% of the power consumption for the 6990 is from the memory. That amount of heat can't just be ignored. In the case of the 6990 that would be 60w of power/heat. It doesn't say exactly how much better HBM is, but even if you half that, you're still at 30w of heat. That can't be ignored.
Yeah the write-up you linked showed an increase of 5.8C when using HBM. I wouldn't say that this is, as you say, "and that memory actually is responsible for a pretty large amount of heat" It is obviously more heat than a custom card would have but not much difference than a blower styles heatsink/fan would have since they actively cool the ram modules on the same heatsink as well.
No change in nm on the core, and large increase in shader count will give you most of the extra heat. The power savings will be mainly from the memory interface I think. The core is not that dissimilar to the 290 series, only thing different is an increase in shader cores and L2 cache (ofc the HBM) The only thing to brig down power/heat is a more mature 28nm process and HBM.
The thing is you can have great performance per watt and still have high heat. You can also have bad performance per watt and have low heat. There are many variables that affect why this can happen.
The FuryX is beating the 980TI in half these games or so, which isn't bad.
We need Vulkan/DX12! And in these GameWorks games you have most of the physics processing done on the discrete GPU, which is lame, considering it can be done easily on a quad core CPU, under a low overhead API. I don't know....
What's the first DX12 game we're getting this year, if anyone know?