AMD Radeon R9 285 "Tonga Pro" Officially Launches On 2nd September

AMD has already mentioned that they have a event planned for 23rd August which will be livestreamed to the public audition. The so chosen "30 Years of Graphics and Gaming Celebration" will take place on Sat where Richard Huddy, AMD's Main Gaming Scientist is going to brief and item their adjacent generation of graphics appliances and products. AMD has already teased that there are going to be announcements regarding a GPU over at the event and they showed us a large "Evolution of AMD Radeon GPUs" infographics a few days agone that leaves room for a new annunciation that remains to exist seen on 23rd August 2022.

A slide posted from Videocardz which is function of the NDA material sent to press and reviewers has revealed that the announcement will be regarding AMD's side by side generation Tonga GPU architecture which has higher efficiency that translates into almost half the ability consumption of Tahiti yet being faster than the Radeon R9 280 series cards. But information technology should be pointed out that the entire conference is not restricted to a single annunciation and we may even see some new surprise announcements regarding the software side of things such as Mantle or DirectX 12 API support from AMD, fifty-fifty at this point of time, AMD is working on the much awaited HBM (High Bandwidt Memory) which is expected to make its way into GPUs sooner or later so something about that would be really interesting however don't take my word on this. AMD Radeon Evolution of GPUs

I am talking about HBM since merely a few days ago, I stumbled upon this interesting slide from AMD which talked about PIM (Processing in memory) and new memory solutions such as HMC and HBM for the exascale market. We have already talked about PIM and die stacking in previous articles since AMD is definitely interested to make it happen for their next generation products and PIM basically reduces bandwidth bottlenecks while increasing power efficiency, enhance compute performance and the master processor dice can be optimized for loftier compute to bandwidth ratio. This allows the primary processor and the DRAM stack to run in a coherent mode which is a fundamental operation of the heterogeneous system architecture. AMD has already evaluated the PIM and HBM retentivity designs for 22nm and 16nm nodes and we can run across how the design handles different GPU designs ranging from 8 CUs upto 32 and 64 CUs. In that location are likewise some preliminary operation numbers posted in the nautical chart which prove gains in both 22nm and 16nm nodes of how much the PIM design tin can be competitive in terms of speed with the host. The slide can exist downloaded from AMD TOP-PIM Host_Public.

Well this was all just time to come talk but permit's focus on what nosotros know most the Tonga GPU itself. The specifications of the Tonga GPU were confirmed a few weeks back when AMD revealed their latest FirePro W7100 GPU and nosotros have already seen block diagram of the Pro variant just a few hours ago which confirm that the Radeon R9 285 will characteristic 1792 stream processors configured in 28 compute units. Based on the GCN one.1 die, the Tonga GPU has 32 Compute Units in total only we are looking at a toned down version which has four CUs disabled resulting in the 1792 SPs variant. The Tonga GPU has 4 triangles per clock wheel, 32 ROPs, 112 TMUs, L2 cache of 512/1024 KB and a 256-bit memory controller. The Radeon R9 285 features a 4 GB GDDR5 memory running across a 256-fleck double-decker pumping out acumulative bandwidth of 176 GB/s since its clocked at 1375 MHz . The Tonga GPU was always meant to exist highly efficient and AMD has toned down its TDP to sub-150W and then we can say a TDP of 150W is what's to expect from the consumer Radeon R9 285 variant which goes on sale this month.

From the block diagram comparing posted by Hardware.Fr, nosotros noticed that the Tonga GPU houses eight ACE (Asynchronous Compute Units) compared to just two on Tahiti and each shader engine has its own geometry processor and a rasterizer unit which houses 8 Compute Units per block. The Tonga Pro variant has two of these CUs disabled resulting in 1792 stream processors. The Multimedia accelerators block has been updated with the XDMA CrossFire engine and improver of TrueAudio DSPs which evangelize the TrueAudio tech. Terminal we can see a large L2 enshroud, part of which is blacked out which points that this model doesn't feature the full core simply information technology does have a larger cache compared to Tahiti which may tell why the card is less resilient to bandwidth.

Fudzilla was presently to report that the Radeon R9 285X which is the reported name for the Tonga XT based variants features the full 32 CU dice which includes 2048 stream processors, 32 ROPs and 128 TMUs. We don't take any specifics regarding the clock speeds, even the ones reported for the Radeon R9 285 are based off factory overclocked variants and then we tin can't be so certain but 918 MHz is what's being said the reference clock for Radeon R9 285 so nosotros can wait something around 933 MHz+ for the Tonga XT variant. What's weird is that the Radeon R9 285X is allegedly featuring a 384-bit memory bus compared to 256-chip omnibus on its Pro variant and also includes a college VRAM updated from 2 GB to iii GB.

The Radeon R9 285 is already considered a mid-tier board from its looks and blueprint but the Radeon R9 285X could be a decent update over Radeon R9 280X' Beingness similar to Tahiti in board blueprint merely the updated core with new architecture will leverage the performance and while the Tahiti XT variants have a TDP of 250W, we can come across a sub 200W TDP for Tonga XT variants which arrive in September equally reported by the source. The pricing for the Radeon R9 285 could fall in between $250 The states while the Radeon R9 285X could retail at $300 US since Tahiti XT and Tahiti Pro based cards take already received major cost cuts during the final few months. Do annotation that the specifications for the Tonga Pro and the 32 CU full die for Tonga XT are more or less confirmed. In that location are a few missing bits and pieces just I wait that they will exist uncovered over the upcoming AMD event.

On a side notation, the following Clud3D Radeon R9 285 CoolStream carte was spotted a few weeks back so those of you interested in the make tin can get a glimpse of what they accept to offer, the residual of the cards can be seen here.

AMD Radeon R9 285 Launch Date Confirmation (Courtesy of Videocardz):

AMD Tonga Pro and Tonga XT Block Diagram Comparisons:

AMD Radeon R9 285 "Tonga" Specification Canvass":

	AMD Radeon R7 260X	AMD Radeon R9 270	AMD Radeon R9 270X	AMD Radeon R9 280	AMD Radeon R9 280X	AMD Radeon R9 285	AMD Radeon R9 285X "Rumor"	AMD Radeon R9 290	AMD Radeon R9 290X	AMD Radeon R9 295X "Rumor"	AMD Radeon R9 295X2
GPU Core	Neptune XT	Curacao Pro	Curacao XT	Tahiti Pro	Tahiti XT	Tonga Pro	Tonga XT	Hawaii Pro	Hawaii XT	Hawaii XTX	Vesuvius
GPU Process	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
GPU Cores	896	1280	1280	1792	2048	1792	2048	2560	2816	2816	5632
Core Clock	1100 MHz	900 MHz	975 MHz	933 MHz	m MHz	918 MHz	TBA	947 MHz	thou MHz	~1100 MHz	1018 MHz
VRAM	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5	2 GB GDDR5	3 GB GDDR5?	4 GB GDDR5	4 GB GDDR5	four GB GDDR5	eight GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1625 MHz	1400 MHz	1400 MHz	1250 MHz	1500 MHz	1375 MHz	1500 MHz?	1250 MHz	1250 MHz	~1250 MHz	1250 MHz
Memory Motorcoach	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit	384-bit	384-fleck	256-bit	384-scrap?	512-bit	512-fleck	512-bit	512-bitx2
Retention Bandwidth	104.0 GB/s	179.2 GB/s	179.2 GB/due south	224.4 GB/s	288.0 GB/south	176.ii GB/south	288.0 GB/s?	320 GB/s	320 GB/due south	320 GB/s	320 GB/south x 2
TMUs / ROPs	56 / 16	fourscore / 32	80 / 32	116 / 32	128 / 32	112 / 32	128 / 32	160 / 64	176 / 64	176 / 64	176 / 64 10 2