TOKYO: AMD’s much expected R9 Fury X (water-cooled) and R9 Fury (air-cooled) GPUs will respectively sell for $649 and $549, AMD revealed today at the E3 gaming conference. The Fury X and Fury, based on AMD’s next-gen Fiji GPU architecture, sport 1.05GHz.+ and 1GHz. clock speeds to go with 4096 and 3584 stream processors. As expected, both GPUs come with 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). AMD promises HBM will provide 60% more bandwidth than existing GDDR5 chips and over 3x as much bandwidth per watt, while consuming a fraction of the surface area. SK Hynix (OTC:HXSCF) is producing AMD’s HBM chips. Fury X cards go on sale on June 24, and Fury cards on July 14. This summer, AMD also plans to launch the R9 Nano, a Fiji/HBM GPU meant for cards that are just 6″ long, but which are still promised by AMD to be more powerful than the existing R9 290X (while consuming much less power). A top-of-the-line solution featuring dual Fury X GPUs (the Fury X2) will arrive this fall. AMD has also unveiled Project Quantum, a small-form-factor concept PC containing two Fiji GPUs and split into two sections; it’s working with OEMs to bring it to market. For more cost-sensitive buyers, AMD has unveiled its R9 and R7 300 series cards, which are based on the older GCN GPU architecture and use GDDR5 memory. R9 300 prices range from $199 for the R9 380 (970MHz., 2GB memory, 1792 stream processors) to $429 for the R9 390X (1.05GHz., 2816 stream processors, 8GB memory). The R7 360 and 370 respectively go for $109 and $149.AMD is counting on the GPUs to take back share lost to Nvidia, and for the Fury line in particular to regain ground in the lucrative high-end segment, where interest in GPU-intensive 4K gaming is acting as a tailwind. Ahead of AMD’s reveal, Nvidia launched the GTX 980 Ti, a $649 product only fractionally slower than the $999 GTX Titan X. Previously: AMD sets 2H15 guidance, unveils new CPUs, offers ambitious roadmap
