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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Nate0007 - Tuesday, June 30, 2015 - link
LOL.You took the words right out of my mouth. He really needs to grow up or go back to school and coninue his education. That or we should all take his word for it that he knows more about Graphics cards then the engineers at AMD. LMAO Poor guy, I hope he is not another Generation X living in his parents Basement.
Taristin - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
An interesting lack of capacitors on these new AMD cards. Were they needed for the old style VRam, or have AMD designed a new way of not needing them?looncraz - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
I believe, if anything, they are using surface mount multilayer ceramic caps in an effort to keep the height profile down to minimize the amount of work that needed to be done on the heatsink/waterblock.DanNeely - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
That's possible. Looking closely at new vs old single GPU boards, there is at least one component on the new one present in about the same area/quantities as 2 of the 3 sets of capacitors on the old board. They're low profile black rectangles marked either "159 C40" or "160 C40" and are polarity marked. There're 4 159 parts on the rear of the board (near the video out) vs 6 small electrolytic caps, and 14 160 parts on the front of the board vs 10 large electrolytic caps. I don't know how to interpret the markings on the 150/160 C40 parts; and don't have any pictures of the electrolytic caps in enough detail to read their capacity to tell if the apparent replacements are similar in size to the old caps or not.The more interesting bit is that unless their replacements are some of the 160's at the front of the board though, the 10 medium size electrolytic caps between the VRMs and ram are gone without a replacement. If these were used to make the ram happy I could see them being unneeded now; but if that was the case would've expected them to be spaced around the ram itself instead of all in a single area.
MrTeal - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
The black caps are 16V rated 150uF Panasonic polymer tantalum caps that are on the 12V side of each power phase. The 150/160 is the capacitance in uF, Cxx gives the voltage rating (16V for C) and a lot code (the xx). The output caps would generally be between the inductors and the chip, but they're obviously not in this picture. I would imagine they're on the rear of the board.CloseEnough - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
A close enough fix to perspective in the above image.As we can see there's a big difference in size
http://www.mediafire.com/view/zk6uorln5ltmx9h/fiji...
meacupla - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
That's small. Possibly even small enough to fit a high power HBM GPU onto a half height/low profile card.TeXWiller - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
They did have the R9 Nano concept card in the event. Probably the minimum size of the thermal solution is the limiting factor here.Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
The Nano is full height, not half height.HaryHr - Wednesday, June 17, 2015 - link
AMD Radeon Fury MAXX seams like reasonable name.