AMD Launches Retail Radeon 300 Series: A Prelude To Fury
by Ryan Smith on June 18, 2015 10:35 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon 300
Throughout the last couple of months AMD has been in the process of carefully and deliberately rolling out their latest generation of video cards. In a multi-staged process we have seen AMD engage in a what is best described as a drawn-out teaser and an early technical briefing, announcing their intention to roll out a new high-end video card this quarter, further teasing the public with pictures of the card, and then in the middle of all of that giving the technical press an in-depth briefing on AMD’s key next-generation memory technology, High Bandwidth Memory. While AMD did their best to make sure the details of the cards were kept under wraps – with varying results – AMD definitely wanted to make sure the world would know that their card was coming.
Catching up to the present, earlier this week AMD held their 2015 GPU product showcase, dubbed “The New Era of PC Gaming.” As the latest stage in AMD’s master plan, AMD held a public event in Los Angeles similar to their 2014 GPU product showcase in Hawaii, where the company announced their product lineup ahead of the full launch of the products in question. In the presentation we learned some (but not all) of the details surrounding AMD’s Radeon 300 series, including the numbered products from 360 to 390, and of course the company’s new high-end flagship video card, the Radeon R9 Fury X.
All told the showcase itself was something of a teaser itself – we got prices, but not complete specifications – but we also received confirmation of AMD’s rollout plans. The next stage, coinciding with today’s article, is the formal launch of the numbered members of the Radeon 300 series, which are product refreshes based on existing AMD GPUs, similar to what we saw with the 200 series in 2013. Meanwhile today is also the greater unveiling (but not the launch) of the Fury series, with AMD allowing us to share more details about the new card and its specifications. Following today’s announcements and launches, the Radeon R9 Fury X will be launching in just under a week from now, on June 24th, and then after that the R9 Fury (vanilla) will be launching on July 14th.
| AMD R9 300 Series Specification Comparison | ||||||
| AMD Radeon R9 Fury X | AMD Radeon R9 Fury | AMD Radeon R9 390X | AMD Radeon R9 390 | |||
| Stream Processors | 4096 | (Fewer) | 2816 | 2560 | ||
| Texture Units | 256 | (How much) | 176 | 160 | ||
| ROPs | 64 | (Depnds) | 64 | 64 | ||
| Boost Clock | 1050MHz | (On Yields) | 1050MHz | 1000MHz | ||
| Memory Clock | 1Gbps HBM | (Memory Too) | 5Gbps GDDR5 | 5Gbps GDDR5 | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 4096-bit | 4096-bit | 512-bit | 512-bit | ||
| VRAM | 4GB | 4GB | 8GB | 8GB | ||
| FP64 | 1/16 | 1/16 | 1/8 | 1/8 | ||
| TrueAudio | Y | Y | Y | Y | ||
| Transistor Count | N/A | N/A | 6.2B | 6.2B | ||
| Typical Board Power | 275W | (High) | 275W | 275W | ||
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | ||
| Architecture | GCN 1.2 | GCN 1.2 | GCN 1.1 | GCN 1.1 | ||
| GPU | Fiji | Fiji | Hawaii | Hawaii | ||
| Launch Date | 06/24/15 | 07/14/15 | 06/18/15 | 06/18/15 | ||
| Launch Price | $649 | $549 | $429 | $329 | ||
Overall AMD is launching an almost top-to-bottom refresh of its product lineup overnight. Between now and July 14th the company and its partners will introduce cards from $109 to $649, and while there are a few gaps that AMD is almost certainly purposely leaving in place to give them something to announce later this year, overall we’re seeing more or less AMD’s entire hand for 2015 and early 2016 in one go.
As for the subjects at hand today, there are really two stories to talk about. The first is of course the Radeon R9 Fury series, the products that will house AMD’s newest flagship GPU, Fiji. While I won’t butter up Fiji from an architectural standpoint at this time, what Fiji does bring to the table are two very big changes for AMD. The first of these is of course high bandwidth memory, which not only gives AMD more VRAM bandwidth than ever before, but it outright changes how GPUs video cards are constructed. The second big change is that Fiji is just very big. At 596mm2 AMD went right to the reticle limit, putting AMD squarely into the big GPU race.
But before Fury comes the rest of the 300 series. We'll take a look at Fury in due time - while we've been briefed on the subject and have been authorized to discuss it, we want to hold back for when we have the hardware in hand - so our focus for today will be on what's launching today, and that's the Radeon 300 series.
Being released today are five new cards from AMD’s partners, which will form the backbone of the Radeon 300 series from $109 to $429. To our regular readers these parts will be familiar – and to some, perhaps more familiar than they’d like – while for AMD the 300 series represents their 3rd generation of retail 28nm products.
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soldier45 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
AMD fanboys as bad as Apple ones...Michael Bay - Friday, June 19, 2015 - link
Just more desperate.chizow - Friday, June 19, 2015 - link
And fans of inferior products. At least Apple products excel in end-user experience and functionality even if they tend to skimp on pure hardware.slickr - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
The Fury line is amazing, no doubt about it. Fury X is the graphic card to get for high end gaming, its small form factor, its water cooled which means really quiet, really cool, keeps the inside case temperatures low as well.That said their rest of the lineup is garbage, actual garbage! All of the 300 series are rebagged 200 series cards with absolutely no optimizations either. I thought that they would at least update the feature set and introduce new stuff, but no.
The expected price cuts are nowhere to be seen either. From the low end to mid range at $150 to the high end at $330 and $430 these are all high prices. I can find a 290 for $240 these days, I can find a 290x for $350 these days. Why are the rebaged turds more expensive than the 200 series turds?
AMD are done, I expected a new line, a new architecture or at least significant changes to the point its almost a new architecture, but no we got the same old shit cards from 4 years ago and the 200 series are regabed turds from the 7000 series.
Same fucking price, same performance, same power consumption, same crap features as 4 years ago and higher prices. Bye, bye AMD I'm going to Nvidia you morons! I was waiting for AMD to release their "new" line to upgrade, but no they are morons and they release 4 years old turds that can't even run windows OS!
FMinus - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
If the re-branded line stays competitive, the general public does not care, neither do I. If we go by the benches, the R9 390X is on par with the 980GTX or slightly above it at certain resolutions, for $70 cheaper this is a deal, regardless of re-branding or not.redcloudsk - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Why....Why.....Why.....no HDMI 2.0..............huge disappointment for peopl who use 4k TV as a monitor......chizow - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Welp. Rebrandeon 300 series happened contrary to what many of you said months ago after the AMD Financial Analsysts Day, so I guess I told you so. :)Fury looks to be a solid part though, good thing AMD priced it accordingly, those early pricing rumors wouldn't have held up well in the marketplace, I don't think.
Still some unknowns however going forward, how badly 4GB will impact Fury, how much HBM will benefit, and exactly what features AMD GCN can and cannot do in DX12. We'll see soon enough I am sure, hopefully AMD doesn't forget to send out some Fury's to AT in the next few weeks! :)
JDG1980 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
I just don't see these rebrands as being at all competitive. The Hawaii rebadges, in terms of pure performance, are roughly on par with the GTX 970 and GTX 980 respectively, but they use about twice as much power and have a far more outdated feature set (to name a few examples: GM204 has HDMI 2.0, hybrid HEVC decoding, better support for DirectX 12 features, and DSR is superior to AMD's VSR except perhaps on GCN 1.2 cards). Given that, pricing the Hawaii rebadges so close to the GM204 offerings just isn't realistic. Worse for AMD, Nvidia has a lot more room to drop prices (GTX 980 should really be quite a bit lower - the big price gap between it and the GTX 970 only made sense when it was a flagship card.) Because GM204 has a smaller die, a memory bus half as wide, and much lower power requirements, it's much cheaper to product GM204 cards than Hawaii cards. So AMD can't gain profits if they try to compete on price.What AMD really should have done was release Tonga as the R9 380 (instead of the R9 285) in the first place. They could then have rebranded Hawaii to R9 390/R9 390X at the same time (last September). If done as a "virtual release" (no reference cards), this would serve the purpose of getting the terrible reference Hawaii benchmarks off the charts and replaced with more representative figures from AIB cards. AMD could have stuck with the old 200-series branding for everything below Tonga, and just discontinued the Tahiti cards. This would have saved AMD the humiliation of having to rebrand the over three-year-old Pitcairn chip yet again. The impact of rebadging would have been reduced, since there would have been one truly new chip (Tonga) and only one rebranded chip (Hawaii). And when the Fury release came around, it wouldn't be marred by having to share the stage with a bunch of shoddy rebadges.
One thing is for sure, AMD really needs to have a whole new lineup for 2016 when the FinFET process finally rolls around. The fact that they were only able to afford two new designs for all of 2015 (Fiji and Carrizo) is worrisome. They're going to be bringing out the server/HEDT version of Zen, plus a 28nm desktop Excavator APU, in 2016. Can they afford to spin three or more FinFET GPUs on top of that? Southern Islands (7000 series) had 3 new chips released in the first wave, so I'd consider that a minimum requirement for a viable launch of a new generation. If AMD releases only one FinFET chip and rebadges everything else yet again, I think even their remaining die-hard fans are going to desert them.
chizow - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
Fully agree with the first paragraph, but it is obvious Nvidia will have to adjust the 980 price again, not so much against the 290X, but more against pressure from Fury Pro and Nano. They have some time before this happens. The 970 still has no peer though, its pretty amazing AMD didn't try to be more competitive here.2nd paragraph, I'd disagree slightly. AMD was clearly waiting for Fiji to be ready to combat Nvidia's Maxwell series, but I guess HBM growing pains and their biggest die ever delayed that process. I still think AMD was caught unprepared on 28nm pt. 2 and they just didn't think Nvidia would launch a whole new generation on 28nm. Once Nvidia came out with the 970/980 they had to scramble and go forward with Fiji and just HBM1.
Personally, I think they should've just gone with their old series designations. Fury X/Pro/Nano just aren't fast enough or priced high enough to justify a different nomenclature. 390X WCE, 390X, 390 would've been just fine, which would have allowed them to sell Hawaii rebrands as 380/X, Tonga rebrands as 370, Bonaire as 360. No Rebrandeon chuckles. :)
They'll certainly have a whole new lineup for 14/16nm FinFET, but how they release will be a telling sign on how far behind their R&D has fallen. They can get a pass for expecting 20nm to be ready and getting caught offguard with 28nm redux, but they won't get a pass for 14/16nm.
Qwertilot - Friday, June 19, 2015 - link
Biggest pressure on the 980 is probably from the ti ;)If the rumours about (really very limited to start with) availability for Fury are true, they couldn't really have put it in the stack as a 390 on those grounds alone. Feels like they had to launch it a little earlier than really ideal (the 4GB too of course) but I suppose its more about getting some mindshare at this point anyway.
You can, I think, see a good chunk of their future finfet line up. Just die shrink fury, half its TDP and there you go for the mid range line :) Might be quite effective if doing it that way lets them get there a bit ahead of NV.
Top end less clear, but that'll probably need HBM2 which seems like it might be a hold up.