While AMD is doing a bang up job of hyping its use of HBM in its next generation Fiji GPUs, it’s apparently opting to re-brand many of its last generation cards to flesh out the new range. It turns out that AMD is planning to take its 290X and call it a 390X, a strategy it has used frequently in recent years.
While not confirmed by AMD, partner XFX seems to have let the cat out of the bag by posting an image of a 390X card on the 290X product page. While that picture appears to have been pulled at the time of writing, it’s too little too late as of course an intrepid visitor copied it quickly enough for us to get a look at it.
Although we can’t see many specifications of the card in the image, the fact that it does have a sticker denoting 8GB of GDDR5 tells us this isn’t one of the new Fiji cores. Fiji uses the new High Bandwidth Memory which, as time of its release, will be restricted to a maximum of 4GB.
That doesn’t mean performance won’t be improved between the generations, as 8GB does double up on what the 290X was sporting, but it won’t be the same as the gains expected from the new architecture AMD is using in its Fiji chips.
This is another blow to fans of the long time chip maker, which for all its bombastic celebration of the new type of GPU memory it has created, is only looking likely to introduce two new graphics cards this generation, with the rest being repackaged hardware from two years before.
The fact that AMD hasn’t released a truly revolutionary graphics chip since GCN was launched in 2011 is really starting to shake its core enthusiast audience.
