AMD Shows Off Dual-GPU Fiji Card At PC Gaming Show
by Ryan Smith on June 17, 2015 8:00 AM ESTBriefly announced and discussed during AMD’s 2015 GPU product presentation yesterday morning was AMD’s forthcoming dual Fiji video card. The near-obligatory counterpart to the just-announced Radeon R9 Fury X, the unnamed dual-GPU card will be taking things one step further with a pair of Fiji GPUs on a single card.
Meanwhile as part of yesterday evening’s AMD-sponsored PC Gaming Show, CEO Dr. Lisa Su took the stage for a few minutes to show off AMD’s recently announced Fury products. And at the end this included the first public showcase of the still in development dual-GPU card.
There’s not too much to say right now since we don’t know its specifications, but of course for the moment AMD is focusing on size. With 4GB of VRAM for each GPU on-package via HBM technology, AMD has been able to design a dual-GPU card that’s shorter and simpler than their previous dual-GPU cards like the R9 295X2 and HD 7990, saving space that would have otherwise been occupied by GDDR5 memory modules and the associated VRMs.
Meanwhile on the card we can see that it uses a PLX 8747 to provide PCIe switching between the two GPUs and the shared PCIe bus. And on the power delivery side the card uses a pair of 8-pin PCIe power sockets. At this time no further details are being released, so we’ll have to see what AMD is up to later on once they’re ready to reveal more about the video card.
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CPUGPUGURU - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
You're assuming that back when AMD was designing its not new Tonga/Fiji that 4K gaming was on the map, it wasn't, 4K monitors were very expensive, no one had any idea 4K would be the future proofing standard it is today, even now its a year or two from prime time gaming.AMD is hiding this fact by keeping testers from benchmarking Fiji and pumping Fiji full of propaganda before it gets busted by the 4K gaming Fact that 4GB is too little and too lame to 4K game. When any memory Hits the 4GB limit its performance will be destroyed, and that's already a 4K gaming Fact that HBM1 can't escape.
Oxford Guy - Saturday, June 20, 2015 - link
Funny how the craptastic VRAM of the 970 (28 GB/s for the second partition), especially in SLI, hasn't garnered nearly the same level of scorn. Nvidia is still advertising the card as offering 4 GB of 224 GB/s speed on their website, even.FlushedBubblyJock - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
Oh really, you hammered it worse than any of the above, and so did and do all the amd fans.The problem and difference is it was already released and benched - benched a lot and found to be killer perf for price.
In this amd case, we have a tech limit and everyone should be very concerned, as we have not seen the results other than sparse, specialized, amd leaked benches.
Mikemk - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
So would you rather they wait till the next node and release HBM as a new possibly buggy expensive technology, or release it now and have it be more reliable and slightly cheaper when it is needed?CPUGPUGURU - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
You assume HBM would be buggy you assume wrong, and its expensive now, so your assuming points are pointless.FlushedBubblyJock - Tuesday, June 23, 2015 - link
I have to laugh Mikemk, because amd fans blabbered over and over how amd was cutting edge ddr5 technology and they have the upper hand releasing it and blah blah blah ... now amd ddr5 goes 5k or 6k and nvidia's is a solid 7k and oc's to 8k, thus meaning amd screwed it up and still is screwing it up in comparison.xthetenth - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
I'm sorry to hear your computer doesn't have extra fan slots.A radiator's hardly wasting space when it's allowing more flexibility and lower temps compared to a card using a similar volume.
CPUGPUGURU - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
There is no sense to saving space where space is not a problem, I never had a space issue with the length of GPU cards but placing another very thick radiator is a major problem. Its a bad space saving joke when the card needs a massive radiator, how hard is that to understand.A air cooled card takes up less space than what you AMD pumpers are pumping and a air cooled is much easier to install. So quit pumping the small space saving BS when you need mount a massively thick radiator close to your marketing gimmick 4GB HBM1 that's 4K gaming insufficient and not needed on 28nm GPUs.
SonicKrunch - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Have I missed the DX12 announcement change that they won't be able to effectively use SLI(as this card essentially is) Full VRAM? DX12 will allow both cards VRAM to be used now. So this will have 8GB of VRAM effectively under DX12.Kjella - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
Not even close to having 8GB, more like the way the GTX970 has 4GB of RAM where 3.5GB is fast and 0.5GB slow only the last 4GB will be even slower and in use by another GPU. With alternate frame rendering like CF/SLI does today almost all assets are needed on both cards. You need to write a tiled rendering path so they can divide the work spatially and not temporally, but this has obvious problems with reflections, shadows and such that impact the whole frame. And with single cards giving GTX980 Ti/Fury performance, it won't be worth it. I expect that outside tech demos 95%+ of developers will use DX12 like they use DX11.