The graphics card war has entered a new phase. On one side we have Nvidia with very high-level announcements for its Titan cards, and on the other side we see AMD, with what is probably its brand-new Radeon R9 390X. Why do I say "probably"? Because its specifications reach us through a leak. If those numbers are true (and everything points to them being so), we are looking at a 60 percent jump over the performance of the R9 290X.
This is the rumor control; here are the facts: Every time we imagine the possibility of a cooling in the arms race, the two main graphics card manufacturers leave us speechless. Nvidia already shook the table with its new GTX Titan X, which will hit the market carrying 12 GB of RAM, more CUDA cores and improvements in its frequencies, all under the same TDP. Apparently, the definitive specifications of the Titan X forced AMD to change its plans. The original idea was to launch its next flagship card with 4 GB of RAM, but the 12 GB of the Titan X threw that idea straight into the trash. It is at this point that the Radeon R9 390X appears, or at least, the rumors strongest about it. If we obey the slides that leaked in the last few hours, everything is under a confidentiality agreement, but the feeling is that these are pretty solid data.
The new Radeon R9 390X will have a Fiji XT chip with 28-nanometer manufacturing. Memory will go from 4 to 8 gigabytes, but there is something very interesting: it will not be GDDR5, but HBM, a variant of stacked DRAM. It is assumed that the R9 390X will have four stacks of 2 GB and 1,024-bit bus for each one, which would raise the general memory bus to 4,096 bits, eight times more than the R9 290X. The rest of the specifications tell us about 4,096 unified cores, 1,050 MHz as Boost frequency, 1,250 MHz for memory frequency, and a performance of 8.6 TeraFLOPS. AMD has not published any official benchmark yet, but its estimated calculations point to a 60 percent more performance over the R9 290X, which by itself is already an extraordinary card.
Another detail that did not escape the trained eye is the mention of WCE, Water Cooled Edition, an edition aimed at enthusiasts with thousand-watt power supplies and a desire to make their cards sweat blood. In short, if the slides are accurate with their values, the new Radeon R9 390X should chew through 4K like candy. DirectX 12 support will be complete, and there will be additional optimizations for virtual reality environments. When? Where? How much? Patience. The genie is already out of the lamp, and in Sunnyvale they cannot stay quiet for much longer...
