from the it-better-look-real-for-that-kind-of-$$ dept.
AMD has announced the Radeon Pro Duo, a graphics processing unit that is essentially two Fury X GPUs put together:
Officially AMD's commentary was limited reiterating their desire to have the card tied to the VR industry. However I believe that AMD also delayed the card due to the poor state of AFR scaling in recent AAA games, which would make a dual-GPU card a hard sale in the typical PC gaming market. VR, by contrast, is a much better fit since through technologies such as AMD's affinity multi-GPU, the two perspectives that need to be rendered for VR can be mapped directly to each GPU, avoiding AFR's dependency and pacing issues.
[...] Officially, AMD promotes the Radeon Pro Duo as having 16 TFLOPS of performance; this narrows down the specifications considerably to two fully enabled Fiji GPUs, clocked at around 1GHz. Assuming the card doesn't throttle for heat or power issues, this would put performance at an almost identical level to a Radeon R9 Fury X Crossfire, with a gap of no more than 5%.
[...] Finally, let's talk pricing and availability. AMD has announced that the card will retail for $1499. This is the same price that the Radeon R9 295X2 launched at in 2014, however it's more than double the price of a pair of Fury Xes, so pricing is arguably not aggressive there. On the other hand it's more compact than a pair of Fury Xes (or even a pair of Nanos), so there is the space argument to be made, and as AMD's positioning makes clear this is first and foremost a development card to begin with. Meanwhile the Pro Duo will be shipping in "early Q2 2016", which means we should see it become available in the next one to two months.
This one of the last 28nm cards AMD will be releasing before the launch of 14nm "Polaris" GPUs.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @08:08AM
As soon as all men are put in prison where they belong and the Female Congress amends the Constitution to allow ambitious career women to marry vibrators.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Tuesday March 15 2016, @08:48AM
But will they have Radeon Pro Duos at prison?
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday March 15 2016, @09:08AM
How does the 350W TBP factor into the prison scenario?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 15 2016, @05:32PM
People in prisons need the heat.
To cook, to sleep, to forge weapons... and with the right number of broken fan blades, to feel a bit less lonely.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @09:02AM
There, FTFY
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:24PM
Buuuuut willllll it rrrrrunnnnn linux... Oh, Gnu!!!!
(splooge)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @09:09AM
You must live in Yakima, WA.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 15 2016, @09:12AM
I guess the only thing that makes this for "VR content creation" rather than "VR user" is that it is a costly dual GPU. VR does well with 2 GPUs since 1 GPU can render the scene for each eye. NVIDIA Pascal and AMD Polaris will come out this year and be much better GPUs for consumers.
The rumor mill suggests Polaris will feature HBM1 and not HBM2 [fudzilla.com], due to Hynix being behind schedule on HBM2 production.
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