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Word on the street is that AMD is preparing a replacement for their Radeon R9 290X graphics card. The rumor that surfaced on VideoCardz claims the new GPU will “take the performance crown back” from Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 780 TI. This information supposedly comes directly from one of AMD’s board partners, nevertheless we urge you to take it with a grain of salt as it has not been confirmed yet.
The R9 290X was only released back in October so it’s unlikely that this new graphics card will be part of the R9 300 series. Instead, the source speculates that an R9 295x name sounds more feasible. The new Radeon R9 will most likely use an improved version of the Hawaii, although there are also rumors of a new high performance GPU called Iceland.
The article mentions that AMD might use first generation HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) on its new flagship graphics card. This new technology is said to be able to improve the bandwidth of memory chips, while also greatly reducing power consumption. There are several variants of HBM, but no mention has been made on which type will be used on the new R9.
The first variant scheduled to launch soon is called 4Hi and features four layers of DRAMs and a bandwidth of 128 GB/s. Each of the modules has 1GB of memory so if AMD uses four of them on the flagship, this means the new card will arrive at a grand total of 512 GB/s of bandwidth. By comparison, the R9 290x only offers a bandwidth 320 GB/s.
While all of this sounds good in theory, we’re not sure if AMD’s new graphics card will actually be able to dethrone the GeForce GTX 780 TI from Nvidia. R9 295x is rumored to be launched sometime this summer, although an exact date was not specified.
