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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

AMD has announced the Radeon Pro Duo [anandtech.com], 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.

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