[VideoCardz] Rumour: AMD Radeon R9 490X and 490 launching in late June

[nobelharvards]

Source

 

WCCFTech quoting the above as source

 

Quote

AMD’s Radeon 400 series will launch in June. The preview may happen at Computex which starts end of May. However the official launch will take place end of June. So we are probably looking at paper launch at Computex and hard launch with reviews later that month.

 

What’s more, Radeon R9 490X will be based on Polaris 10. It means there won’t be any Fiji to R9 490 rebranding. This leaves us with two possible scenarios. Either Fury X is faster than Radeon R9 490(X) Polaris 10, and Fury series will be offered alongside Radeon R9 490 line till Vega 10 becomes available, or Fury X is slower than Polaris 10 and it may be used for Radeon R9 480 series instead.

 

What you should know however is that Radeon 490 series will be direct counterparts to GeForce GTX 1080/1070 line, so it may give us some idea on Polaris 10 performance. It’s hard to say if Pascal GP104-based products will be faster than GM200-based cards, but judging from the past they should be. So technically Polaris 10 should also be faster than GTX 980 Ti, but that’s just pure speculation at this point.

The article is short. The above quote emcompasses the entire article.

 

There is not much to it. There is nothing else to be said.

 

I feel like this is old news and this is a repost. Apologies in advance if it is.

[don_svetlio]

490/490X vs 1070/1080 this June. FIGHT!

[FilipSebik]

So when i got money, i won't get an r9 390x But r9 590x according to releasing and its not easy for student to get any money

[Prysin]

when are people going to get it out of their small minded heads that the chance of rebrands from the Fury linup is rather slim.

The GPUs arent designed for 14nm FF. It makes no sense to try rebrand them.

 

It takes 3-4 years to make a GPU architecture. Fiji is the ultimate version of GCN 3 (1.2). The R9 285 came out in 2014, the R9 380 and Fury cards in 2015... 14Nm happening in mid 2016... Meaning if Fiji were to be rebranded, they would have had to design it as a 14nm product FROM THE START. Which obviously they didnt, because the Fiji GPU was destined for TSMCs 20nm Planar. Which bellyflopped.

 

God, all this bullshit about rebranding. Only a few cards is likely to be rebranded, and that is on the lower end, 430, 440, 450, 460 etc.... These cards are pretty sure to be rebrands. But 480 and up? No, not really.

[DXMember]

but it's not a rumor... RTG already told us that they will launch mid year which means end of june when they did their Reddit AMA...

and they also told us that there won't be any rebranding at all, all their 400 series GPUs will be based on 14nm FinFet

[Lethal Seraph]

6 hours ago, don_svetlio said:

490/490X vs 1070/1080 this June. FIGHT!

May the best one win my hard earned money!!

[FilipSebik]

2 hours ago, DXMember said:

and you're a student?

where I live you'd be either in school, in jail or working in a supermarket

In a school during saturday... Yes of course

[Unhelpful]

3 hours ago, Prysin said:

 

I can see x80 being rebranded, I don't see it as likely, but I can see it happening. But x90 and fury equivalent? HAH not a chance.

[226477_1454181668]

13 minutes ago, JoeyDM said:

I can see x80 being rebranded, I don't see it as likely, but I can see it happening. But x90 and fury equivalent? HAH not a chance.

it wont be. Its a Transition to 14nm. It would be cheaper to design a new chip. Not re design another to 14nm

[dalekphalm]

Not entirely surprising. This news practically mirrors the NVIDIA rumours - Paper launch at Computex, hard launch in June/July.

 

For competition's sake, assuming both AMD and NVIDIA are equally good, I hope AMD gets the hard launch first - they could use the leg-up.

 

I won't likely be upgrading this year, but I'm very keen to see the differences between Polaris and Pascal - it's going to be super interesting for PC enthusiasts this summer!

[DXMember]

1 hour ago, Lethal Seraph said:

May the best one win my hard earned money!!

ya, but those are like... high-end cards... I'm waiting for the enthusiast parts to arrive with Vega 11 and GP100

[Briggsy]

Pretty sure AMD would not take the Furry and shave its position down to a re-branded 400 series card. They might be onto something in terms of performance though. GCN 4 has an improved command processor, which has been AMD's Achilles heel in DX11 for current GCN cards, especially at the high end where a lot of cores are not being utilized. I would be willing to bet that Polaris 10 will beat a FuryX in DX11, but not in DX12.  

 

Speaking of rebranding, this news article is a "rebrand" of dozens of older articles from weeks/months ago... or is it a refresh? 

[Citadelen]

1 hour ago, DXMember said:

ya, but those are like... high-end cards... I'm waiting for the enthusiast parts to arrive with Vega 11 and GP100

* Vega 10

[Prysin]

1 hour ago, JoeyDM said:

I can see x80 being rebranded, I don't see it as likely, but I can see it happening. But x90 and fury equivalent? HAH not a chance.

nah, a X80 on AMD side being rebranded doesnt make sense.

 

Following conventional "node shrink" "traditions", we know that for the last 3-4 shrinks, the performance has always increased by 15-20% flat.

Now, if we consider that both AMD and Nvidia has learnt a lot by being stuck at 28nm, and thus having learnt how to properly use a node, we can ssume that the performance gains will be slightly higher, but i would be surprised if a 490 is over 30% faster then a 390.

 

A Fury X is 50% faster then a R9 380, despite both being GCN 3.....

 

AMD has also said that they would be using GDDR5(X?) or HBM for this generation, not HBM2. Meaning a 480 is pretty sure to be a GDDR5(X?) card. That means the Fiji GPU in the Fury cards would need to be fundamentally redesigned to use a completely different memory interface.

 

I expect AMD to use GDDR5(X?) even in the 490 and 490X cards, because atm, AMD needs to recoup some of the investment costs of HBM development. Meaning Fiji would need a full rework even for the 490/490X tier of cards. Redesigning is usually more troublesome then building from scratch. AMD is cash strapped, and more likely to just build something from the ground up that they can cut down into several tiers, like Nvidia does, rather then redesigning things from scratch.

 

Fiji and Tonga is the only GPUs that are likely to be used in rebranding. Hawaii and Pitcairn are way too old now, they lack features, lack in tesselation performance and worst of all, they are NOT EFFICIENT.

AMD has stated that their goal for the next gen cards are 2.5x the perf per watt.... Neither Hawaii or Pitcairn can do that. Tonga/Fiji, maybe, but not GCN 1 or GCN 2 cards.

 

 

IF AMD is rebranding a card, i expect it to be the Tonga GPU, and it would be used for the 450/450X or 460/460X

 

[rattacko123]

6 hours ago, Prysin said:

 

That means the Fiji GPU in the Fury cards would need to be fundamentally redesigned to use a completely different memory interface.

 

 

GDDR5X isn't much different that GDDR5. They wouldn't need to be redesigned

[Prysin]

6 minutes ago, rattacko123 said:

GDDR5X isn't much different that GDDR5. They wouldn't need to be redesigned

Fiji is based on HBM, HBM uses a 4096bit bus interface, the widest GDDR bus is the R9 390Xs bus which is 512bit.

 

This means that the memory interface is 8 times smaller then the memory bus interface that the Fiji interface is designed for. Meaning total redesign of fundamental parts of the GPU is needed to make it work with a much much much smaller memory interface.

 

HBM uses 1/3rd the wattage of a GDDR5 memory system does. Meaning the memory controller in Fiji will be pushed beyond its limits if you are using GDDR5X which uses equal or greater amounts of power then GDDR5 does due to the much much higher clock speeds.

[AshleyAshes]

2 hours ago, Prysin said:

Fiji is based on HBM, HBM uses a 4096bit bus interface, the widest GDDR bus is the R9 390Xs bus which is 512bit.

 

This means that the memory interface is 8 times smaller then the memory bus interface that the Fiji interface is designed for. Meaning total redesign of fundamental parts of the GPU is needed to make it work with a much much much smaller memory interface.

Because AMD has never, ever, EVER taken a chip that supports a wider bus and then bolted memory with a narrow bus onto that chip before, ever, right?

[Doobeedoo]

Can't wait to see flagship Polaris quite exciting.

[Notional]

5 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Because AMD has never, ever, EVER taken a chip that supports a wider bus and then bolted memory with a narrow bus onto that chip before, ever, right?

Not to that extent, and not for a completely different memory technology. Fiji is even designed to be put on an interposer. There is literally 0 reasons for AMD to rebrand Fiji, unless they have a huge stock sitting there. I doubt that is the case. Polaris will be cheaper to produce, give somewhat the same performance, have new features and be much much more efficient.

 

Rebranding rarely happens when going to a new node.

[Agosto]

I'm really waiting for Polaris, HBM2 or not. I have a GTX 670 right now but I'm kind of sick of nVidia nerfing older cards to make newer ones look like they're faster.

[shdowhunt60]

I doubt if they're launching these cards, that they're going to call them the 490 and the 490X. Those'll likely be reserved for Vega, because otherwise they'd be relaunching a line just to have Vega on top.

[Briggsy]

24 minutes ago, shdowhunt60 said:

I doubt if they're launching these cards, that they're going to call them the 490 and the 490X. Those'll likely be reserved for Vega, because otherwise they'd be relaunching a line just to have Vega on top.

Its a tough call on AMD's part. based on core count and known performance of engineering samples of polaris 10 and 11, we're probably looking at 460 and 470 cards compared to Vega, but if they brand them as low tiered cards, they have to sell them for less, so its possible they will be at least 470/480 or 480/490, depending on if Vega is a replacement for the Fury, or multiple SKU's instead.

 

Also, I can't be the only one that thinks of Street Fighter when I hear "Vega."

Spoiler

 

[Sakkura]

On 9/4/2016 at 6:17 PM, Prysin said:

nah, a X80 on AMD side being rebranded doesnt make sense.

 

Following conventional "node shrink" "traditions", we know that for the last 3-4 shrinks, the performance has always increased by 15-20% flat.

Now, if we consider that both AMD and Nvidia has learnt a lot by being stuck at 28nm, and thus having learnt how to properly use a node, we can ssume that the performance gains will be slightly higher, but i would be surprised if a 490 is over 30% faster then a 390.

I can't really agree with that.

 

GF110 to GK110 was damn sure more than a 15-20% increase. Even GK104 beat GF110 by a bigger margin than that (25-30%). Same deal with AMD, once they got their drivers optimized.

 

In addition, this is not a regular process shrink. This is essentially a double, or 1½ node jump.

[Briggsy]

19 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

I can't really agree with that.

 

GF110 to GK110 was damn sure more than a 15-20% increase. Even GK104 beat GF110 by a bigger margin than that (25-30%). Same deal with AMD, once they got their drivers optimized.

 

In addition, this is not a regular process shrink. This is essentially a double, or 1½ node jump.

Sort of an aside thing worth noting, AMD have a new graphic command processor in GCN 1.3, which may improvement dx11 performance. It's a wait and see thing, as the command processor is really only an issue with Hawaii and Fiji for driver optimization. Polaris 10 and 11 may see no dx11 benefit from a beefier command processor, but Vega most certainly will.

[shdowhunt60]

AMD is promising a 2.5X performance per watt gain (overwhat is presumably the r9 285). Saying it's only going to be %10-25 increase is shooting low, especially considering that Pascal is going to be double from what we've seen.