AMD's upcoming Radeon R9 380X and R9 380 graphics cards, with which it wants to immediately address the GTX 980 and GTX 970, will be based on a "new" silicon codenamed "Grenada." Built on the 28 nm silicon fab process, Grenada will be a refined variant of "Hawaii," much in the same way as "Curacao" was of "Pitcairn," in the previous generation.

The Grenada silicon will have the same specs as Hawaii - 2,816 GCN stream processors, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB memory. Refinements in the silicon over Hawaii could allow AMD to increase clock speeds, to outperform the GTX 980 and GTX 970. We don't expect the chip to be any more energy efficient at its final clocks, than Hawaii. AMD's design focus appears to be performance. AMD could save itself the embarrassment of a loud reference design cooler, by throwing the chip up for quiet custom-design cooling solutions from AIB (add-in board) partners from day-one.

It turns out that the big OEM design win liquid cooling solutions maker Asetek was bragging about, is the Radeon R9 390X, and the "undisclosed OEM" AMD. Pictures of a cooler shroud is doing rounds on Chinese tech forums, which reveals something that's similar in design to the Radeon R9 295X2, only designed for single-GPU. The shroud has its fan intake pushed to where it normally is for single-GPU cards; with cutouts for the PCIe power connectors, and a central one, through which liquid cooling tubes pass through.

One can also take a peek at the base-plate of the cooler, which will cool the VRM and memory under the fan's air-flow. The cooler design reveals that AMD wants its reference-design cards to sound quieter "at any cost," even if it means liquid cooling solutions that can be messy with multi-card CrossFire setups, and in systems that already use liquid-cooling for the CPU; and leave it to AIB partners to come up with air-cooled cards, with meatier heatsinks. Other specs of the R9 390X are unknown, as is launch date. It could be based on a member of the "Pirate Islands" family of GPUs, of which the new "Tonga" GPU driving the R9 285 is a part of. A possible codename of AMD's big chip from this family is "Fiji."