AMD’s new flagship Radeon Fiji XT looks to burn the competition

Hardware

May 25, 2015

Does AMD's Fiji XT have what it takes to dethrone the Titan X?

The Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti specs position it as the saviour single-GPU for common mortals. After all, affordability and performance in balance are key factors for any upcoming graphics card gaining ground in the battle for our wallets.

If AMD cannot match NVIDIA, they will fall short, and they’ve positioned their Hawaii XT as well as Hawaii Pro cards to do just that.

That said, sometimes they like to go a little bonkers with their GPUs.

Unofficial picture of the AMD “Fiji XT”. Courtesy of KitGuru.

Recently, new details regarding the AMD’s R9 390X or Fiji XT, as it more popularly known as, have surfaced. Let’s get down and dirty with these leaked details and rumours.

According to Johan Andersson, technical director for Frostbite at EA, they have been actively testing out AMD’s new absurdly fast card. It appears the Fiji XT is using a closed-loop hybrid liquid cooling solution, keeping the card’s performance up and noise to a minimum.

The card will not feature any DVI connectors, and will only have HDMI as well as DisplayPort outputs. The Fiji XT will also be a much shorter card in length than any current generation graphic cards, comparable to something from a decade ago.

The Fiji XT is reported to be based on the revamped GCN 1.3 architecture. It will integrate 4096 stream processors (64 compute units), 256 texture units and a new memory controller.

This new memory controller support vertically stacked high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips. To sweeten the deal, the memory controller will have a 1024-bit I/O interface.

The HBM chips, when compared to GDDR5, are firstly stacked, and as result will have a higher bus width, bandwidth per stack and a lower voltage requirement. The picture below, helps give more perspective on the differences:

This table indicates the differences between GDDR5 and HBM. Table is courtesy of PC Perspective.

If that is not enough for you, take a look at this video which provides more details about HBM:

The AMD behemoth is predicted to carry 4GB or 8GB of HBM memory. Over and above this, it will have with up to 640GB/s of available bandwidth. This is all possible due a 4096-bit memory bus and 1.25GT/s transfer rate.

The card is expected to be priced at around $849, which is R10,137.95, excluding import taxes and duties, for us local folk. The expected pricing for NVIDIA’s GTX 980 Ti looks far more attractive at this point in time.

If the Fiji XT is going to gain traction then, it needs to either be faster as well as cheaper than the Titan X, or a whole heck of a lot faster than the GTX 980 Ti.