As exciting as AMD and Nvidia’s top of the line GPUs are, there’s nothing quite like cramming two of the world’s most powerful graphical processors onto a single board. That’s happened every generation for many years now so it seems likely that it will happen with this one, too and now there’s some new evidence to support the idea.
A report has surfaced (via WCCFTech) of a graphics card shipping out from Canada called Fiji Gemini. This clearly indicates a card that is part of AMD’s flagship line-up of HBM-supporting graphics cards, and the Gemini is the firm’s historic reference to twin graphics cores, suggesting that a twin R9 Fiji XT is on the way.
It may well be that Gemini ends up being the main brand name for this product, since AMD would be unlikely to utilize its traditional XX5 designation as it did with the last generation (295), given that the 300 series has not been used to designate its top-level cards that employ the latest technology.
Related: AMD Radeon R9 Fury X review
Although not much else is known about the card, the shipping manifest that told us about it suggests that it will continue to use the all-in-one cooling solution of the other Fury cards, though whether that will mean a large radiator to cater to cooling two cores remains to be seen.
However, presumably the new card will come with double the high bandwidth memory we saw in the Fury X, which could well solve the issue it appeared to have in some games and benchmarks, where cards with more of the traditional GDDR5 would occasionally outperform it. And while it is likely that it will come with just about double everything its single core cousin has, the GPU frequency is up in there air.
It may be that AMD has bolstered it to further improve performance, but then it may also have lowered it to keep temperatures and power draw in check.
Launch dates and pricing are anyone’s guess, but we wouldn’t be surprised if this card appeared before the end of the year with a price tag just slightly north of $1,000.
