AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano, the most powerful Mini-ITX GPU yet, launches in August

During AMD’s Q2 2015 earnings call, it was confirmed that Radeon R9 Nano is scheduled to release in August of this year.

According to WCCF Tech, Lisa Su, AMD’s president and CEO, said, “Fury just launched, actually this week, and we will be launching Nano in the August timeframe.”

The R9 Nano is the smallest of the Fiji series and the pen-ultimate card to release, at least until such time as AMD announces a fifth card – the final card, of course, being the beastly Radeon R9 Fury X2.

Impressive as the R9 Fury X2 will undoubtedly be, especially given how well multiple Fury X’s scale, the R9 Nano’s diminutive size and massive performance is what has us most interested.

The element we’re most excited about is that the R9 Nano, although it remains unconfirmed for the moment, will make use of the full Fiji XT GPU, rather than the nerfed Fiji Pro GPU found in the non-X R9 Fury.

The current thinking is that the R9 Nano will have a reduced clock speed to make up for the lacking cooling system when compared to the R9 Fury X’s watercooling solution.

For those that haven’t put 2 and 2 together, that means that the R9 Nano is a 6inch long card that should perform better than the R9 290X and require a mere 175w. No matter who you are, that’s impressive.

Category	Radeon R9 Fury X	Radeon R9 Nano	Radeon R9 Fury	Radeon R9 290X
GPU	Fiji XT	Fiji XT, rumored	Fiji Pro	Hawaii XT
Stream Processors	4096	4096, rumored	3584	2816
GCN Compute Units	64	64, rumored	56	44
Render Output Units	64	64, rumored	64	64
Texture Mapping Units	256	256, rumored	224	176
GPU Frequency	1050Mhz	890Mhz* estimated	1000 MHz	1000Mhz
Memory	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	4GB GDDR5
Memory Interface	4096bit	4096bit	4096bit	512bit
Memory Frequency	500Mhz	500Mhz	500Mhz	1250Mhz
Effective Memory Speed	1Gbps	1Gbps	1Gbps	5Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	512GB/s	512GB/s	512GB/s	320GB/s
Cooling	Liquid, 120mm Radiator	Air, Single Axial Fan	Air, Custom AIB Solutions	Air, Single Blower Fan
Performance (SPFP)	8.6 TFLOPS	7.3 TFLOPS* estimated	7.2 TFLOPS	5.6 TFLOPS
TDP	275W	175W	275W	250W
Power Connectors	Dual 8-Pin	8-Pin	Dual 8-Pin	6+8 Pin
GFLOPS/Watt	31.3	42* estimated	26.2	22.4
Launch Price	$649	TBA	$549	$549
Launch Date	June 24 2015	August 2015	July 10 2015	October 24 2013

If the current rumours hold true, the R9 Nano will feature a fully unlocked Fiji XT. That means 16 render back-ends, granting it 64 ROPs, and 256 texture mapping units. That also means 64 GCN units and a magnificent 4096 stream processors. That’s some serious firepower.

For the moment, we don’t have a price point for the R9 Nano, but considering its internals and the considerable engineering that must have gone into developing it, we don’t imagine it’ll be cheap.