Much has been teased and even more has been said about the upcoming generation of AMD GPUs, with suggestions from many sources indicating the new architecture will put an end to the company’s traditionally noisy coolers. Those claims seem even more likely now, as the technical director of EA’s Frostbite engine, Johan Andersson, has tweeted out a picture of a new Radeon, whilst extolling its virtues.
In the image we see the card from side on (or top down depending on your perspective) which shows how low profile it is compared to traditional offerings, taking up just two PCI bracket slots with no overhang. This is thanks to a stock liquid cooling solution. If you look closely, it also appears the rear edge of the card can be seen in the upper left hand corner, indicating the card is as small as earlier leaks suggested.
This new island is one seriously impressive and sweet GPU. wow & thanks @AMDRadeon ! They will be put to good use :) pic.twitter.com/S5hyD6vxNh
— Johan Andersson 🦀🇺🇦 (@repi) May 22, 2015
It’s not clear at this time whether AMD will ship every single one of its new generation graphics cards with the water block and radiator (which would be a waste for those with already impressive WC loops and problematic for those with small cases) but it is looking like AMD has something special up its sleeve.
While the cooling used by the Radeons is not confirmed, we know that they will feature an impressive new memory configuration. The flagship Fiji XT chips are going to have 4GB of memory on board, but not in a traditional GDDR5 format. Instead, they will be using High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which is stacked vertically, saving space on the PCB and reducing power requirements.
HBM also makes it possible to locate the memory far closer to the GPU core, which should in theory equate to lower latency and better performance. The bandwidth offered by the new memory type could be as much as three times that of comparably sized GDDR5 set ups.
