AMD R9 Nano: Small but Powerful
The initial launch of AMD’s Fiji architecture has been a bit rough: The R9 Fury X failed to claim the performance crown from GTX 980 Ti, though it puts up a good fight. Stepping down a notch is the R9 Fury, an air-cooled take on Fiji with eight of the Compute Units (CUs) disabled, but priced $100 lower. When AMD first demonstrated Fury X cards, they also talked about a “Fury Nano,” which has now been officially christened the R9 Nano. We always knew the Nano would use the Fiji core and that it would target a lower-power envelope, which led to rampant speculation on how it would be configured and where it would be priced. It turns out the R9 Nano is both better and worse than we expected. This is best illustrated by jumping straight into the specs table comparing AMD’s current high-end GPUs:
| AMD High-End GPU Specs | ||||
| Card | R9 Fury X | R9 Nano | R9 Fury | R9 390X |
| GPU | Fiji | Fiji | Fiji | Hawaii (Grenada) |
| GCN / DX Version | 1.2 | 1.2 | 1.2 | 1.1 |
| Lithography | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm | 28nm |
| Transistor Count (Billions) | 8.9 | 8.9 | 8.9 | 6.2 |
| Compute Units | 64 | 64 | 56 | 44 |
| Shaders | 4,096 | 4,096 | 3,584 | 2,816 |
| Texture Units | 256 | 256 | 224 | 176 |
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 |
| Core Clock (MHz) | 1,050 | Up to 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,050 |
| Memory Capacity | 4GB | 4GB | 4GB | 8GB |
| Memory Clock (MHz) | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,500 |
| Bus Width (bits) | 4,096 | 4,096 | 4,096 | 512 |
| Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | 512 | 512 | 512 | 384 |
| TDP (Watts) | 275 | 175 | 275 | 275 |
| Price | $649 |
$649 | $549 | $429 |
Surprised? Yeah, so are we! It turns out that the R9 Nano is a fully enabled Fiji GPU, just like the Fury X. It has the same 64 CUs, 4,096 shaders, 256 texture units, and 64 ROPs. The only differences are in the core clock and TDP, along with the cooling solution. Here’s where things get a bit muddy: AMD is listing the GPU clock as “up to 1,000MHz,” but with the 175W TDP it should be fully expected that the card will have to run at lower clocks for certain workloads. It sounds as though demanding workloads (e.g., Furmark) may push the clocks as low as 600MHz, while most games will run at 850–950MHz.
Overall, AMD is claiming a 30 percent improvement in performance over the R9 290X, which is interesting as our own testing of Fury X averaged 34 percent faster than 290X. Best case, at 4K our testing has Fury X outperforming 290X by 40 percent. In other words, with a moderate 50–200MHz drop in GPU clocks, AMD has been able to reduce TDP by over 35 percent. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, however, as the Asus Strix R9 Fury already took a similar tactic by going with a 216W TDP.
It’s also worth noting that it will be possible to overclock the R9 Nano and increase the power target in order to improve performance. AMD has thermal protection on the Nano that kicks in at 85C, but otherwise the card will modify clocks based on the power use. AMD informed us the clock speeds are updated at a microsecond level, so the tuning of performance will happen very quickly and seamlessly to the end user. Here are some of the slides from the presentation.
What will likely surprise a lot of people is the target price. Instead of being a “lesser” Fiji implementation with a lower price point, AMD is going for power efficiency and a price point equal to the Fury X. Basically, these are the same chip and even the same card, with only the cooling really having changed; it’s just that Nano will be tuned for lower TDP while Fury X is pushing maximum performance. AMD is big on comparisons with 290X, showing a 40 percent reduction in board length, (up to) 30 percent higher performance, a 20C drop in target operating temperature (75C vs. 95C), 30 percent lower power requirements, and a 16dB drop in noise levels (vs. the reference blower 290X, which definitely wasn’t a quiet card). As you would expect, much of this is made possible by the use of HBM.
So, what does AMD want users to do with all of this compact goodness? One target market is high-performance mini-ITX systems. While there are certainly mITX cases that have used high-performance graphics cards in the past (Falcon Northwest’s Tiki comes to mind), there’s a minimum size requirement in order house the 10.5-inch graphics card. R9 Nano provides the ability to go with a smaller chassis, or you could have a similar size chassis with more space for storage. We’ve seen small GPUs like the GTX 960 and GTX 970 already, so this isn’t inherently a huge change, but the Nano should deliver a healthy improvement in frame rates over a GTX 970… at roughly twice the cost.
It’s an interesting tactic, and we’ll have to see how well it succeeds. AMD showed off a prototype system at E3 called Project Quantum, which consisted of a Fury X GPU and a mini-ITX motherboard in a sexy-looking custom chassis. Supposedly, some of these had dual Fury X GPUs, except now it’s looking like they were more likely dual Nano GPUs. Only twelve Project Quantum systems were created, but AMD is still looking for someone to take the design and turn it into a retail product. And that’s basically where the R9 Nano should succeed: custom builds where being able to cram a lot of performance into the smallest space possible is the primary concern. If you’re just after raw performance, a larger desktop is easier to build and service, and likely cheaper at the end of the day, but it’s not nearly as eye catching.
Unfortunately, even if you really want to buy an R9 Nano, you can’t do so just yet. Officially, the R9 Nano will go on sale “the week of September 7.” That could mean as early as September 7 or as late as September 11, so we’re about two weeks out from the retail launch. Meanwhile, R9 Fury X is still a bit difficult to find in stock, though Newegg lists at least one model at $670. If things go as planned, R9 Nano should launch with a decent inventory, but based on Fury X, it may not stay in stock for the first several weeks. We’ll have our full review on the official launch date in a couple of weeks.
Follow Jarred on Twitter.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1LCTzwH
