AMD: Pirate Islands (R* 3** series) Speculation/Rumor Thread

You understand the notion of reference specifications vs AIB/partner board specifications, yes?

 

I'm sure it will be covered in the reviews ... any idea when they will be coming out?

 

The rebrands are already being sold, so I guess we'll be seeing their reviews as soon as Tuesday.

Fiji cards are rumored to only be available a week or so afterwards, though.

 

In all likelihood it's 16 512MB chips, vs. 16 256MB chips in the 290X, so I doubt there's any increase in power consumption from the amount of memory. There might be an increase from the higher clocks, but the 390X probably uses memory manufactured on a smaller node, so the power consumption might actually be the same, perhaps even a bit lower.

 

As noted, that can mean something else. But "750 Watt Power Supply (Suggestion)" if allowed to stand could actually cost some sales. Even a decent 650 watt psu should be overkill. Hmm, https://www1.sapphiretech.com/productdetial.asp?pid=AC46C7B3-9A55-4270-8875-ED77018A99BE&lang=eng, same "750 Watt" for the psu but only < 300 watts for the card. This 290x card is only clocked 30 MHz slower, 1020 vs. the 1050 of the faster 390x. Both cards with 8GB. No mention of the black diamond choke from the 290x on the 390x page.

"Black Diamond Choke
Choke is an important component of the graphics card. By working with the component engineer, Sapphire’s black diamond choke is 10% cooler and offers 25% more power efficiency than a normal choke. The graphics card will be more reliable and save energy."

Interesting if it truly does save that much power in the real world. But ouch if the older boards/cards had some better components. Though we can't rule out that the posted spec's were rushed and are off.

 

Graphics card manufacturers are (understandably) wary of crappy PSUs that cannot sustain their nominal wattage, so they tend to grossly overstate the PSU recommendations for their cards. I can't blame them when you have crappy brands like Advance/LC Power/Heden selling 500W PSUs that fail, catch fire or explode as soon as you try to pull more than 250W out of them.

http://www.x86-secret.com/dossier-36-3000-Alimentation_Noname.html

 

That Black Diamond Choke mumbo jumbo sounds a lot like monster cable copywriting. If there is any truth to it at all, my guess is that it's 10% cooler and 25% more power efficient than other chokes, but that it has very little practical impact on the power consumption of the full GPU.

 

I really, really doubt that. It's more likely that some marketing guy compared two temperature readings in °C and computed percentages from them.

 

True, true, and now that I think about it I remember seeing some specification listings flat out just telling you how many amps on the 12v rail your psu should have.
P.S. I managed to originally miss that some of the spec's for the 290x had already been discussed. I regret that.

 

Tri-X OC at 1055Mhz up from 1050Mhz....

I doubt it would be the same chip with twice the memory bus, anyway, this old rumor seems to ping on today's reality except for calling Iceland a cape verde replacement.

http://videocardz.com/51021/amd-gcn-update-iceland-tonga-hawaii-xtx

 

What I mean is: choke A has a loss of 1%. Choke B has a loss of 0.5%. OMG! Choke B is 50% less power than choke A. That, and what you wrote about temperatures. (For the record: all I know about chokes is what I just read on Wikipedia...)

 

Is there any evidence of that? It presumably benefits from GCN3's compression tech, and its competitor (Nvidia's GM108) makes do with a 64bit DDR3 interface (in all known implementations).

 

I do not know.
But I already said this based on the message before mine:

........................

AMD Iceland is a new GPU which is designed to compete against NVIDIA’s GM107 in the mobile graphics segment. It is set to replace the Cape Verde HD 7700 series GPU.

http://www.chiploco.com/amd-iceland-tonga-new-technologies-35155/

 

No, Iceland seems to be an updated a variant of Oland for R5/R7 Mxxx series mobile graphics, not related to Cape Verde , Pitcairn etc. used in R9 Mxxx serirs.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1841223/
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1841289/
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1843980/
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1843993/
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1844096/


BTW, lower-end mobile R5 200-series and R5 300 series graphics parts are not based on Oland, but on a different revision named Hainan (hardware IDs AMD666x), which looks like a headless hybrid-graphics only version...

Iceland seems to be different though since it goes up to R7 M260/M360 - both driver ID strings and CodeXL 1.7 analyler options have it for mid-end 200-series parts R5 M255 and R7 M260 launched in June 2014, and the new R5 M315, R7 M340, R7 M360 parts are listed in the driver .INF file, as I said above.
Too bad CodeXL doesn't care to list any further rebrands of the same hardware ID...

 

So, there will be Antigua XT (Tonga XT) with 2048 shaders in R9 380X?

The first table misses it.



Gigabyte, XFX, Asus Radeon 300 Series Leaked And Pictured – R9 380, R7 370 And R7 360 Custom Models

Read more: http://wccftech.com/gigabyte-xfx-amd-300-series-380-360-pictured/#ixzz3d70hu3Tl



Sapphire Radeon 300 Series Lineup Leaked – 390X Tri-X OC With Dual 8-Pin Connectors, Radeon R9 Fury X and Fury Sighted

Read more: http://wccftech.com/sapphire-radeon...rs-radeon-r9-fury-fury-sighted/#ixzz3d71KNSF5

 

Apparently not.. at least, not in this first wave of rebrands.
It's a shame, though. While the R9 380 does compete well with the GTX 960, an unlocked Tonga with 32 CUs would fill in the enormous market/performance gap that presently exists between the 960 and 970, or between 380/285 and 390/290.

It's like AMD couldn't be bothered to build a single new SKU apart for the Fury cards:

 

Only by sacrificing profit. I would be surprised if skipping a generation was financially good idea.
Clock changes of 380 show AMD having higher confidence in memory bandwidth efficiency, but they are still 50% behind GM206.

 

Blind spot perception as noted.

 

The GM206 doesn't have 50% better bandwidth efficiency than Tonga. Once you start going above 1080p, the GM206's lower bandwidth will start tanking much harder than Tonga in many titles.
It's clearly more bandwidth-limited:




What you could argue is that the GM206's projected bandwidth of 106GB/s is better balanced for 1080p than Tonga's 170GB/s, given both cards' compute/geometry performance, and you'd probably be right. But just because these cards have similar performance results in 1080p, you can't automatically assume that GM206 has 50% better bandwidth efficiency.

 

I didn't, however my formulation was certainly imprecise. No assumptions are needed when you just take the card specs for what they are. On other hand you can't automatically assume that performance drop at higher resolution is caused by bandwidth constrains.