AMD is soon going to release their high-performance Radeon 300 series lineup featuring the Fiji GPU powered graphics cards. While it was known that Fiji would be the flagship chip of the lineup, it is now being reported by Sweclockers that Fiji would also be the only new chip in the Radeon 300 series family while the rest of the cards will feature the current GCN cores based on the GCN 1.1 and GCN 1.2 architecture.

AMD Fiji GPU Is The Only New Chip For Radeon 300 Series - Remaining Chips Feature Current GCN Architecture

While the news sounds surprising, it was kind of expected that AMD will fuse some of their current and old cores on the upcoming graphics family as the have done with Radeon 200 series. The Tahiti GPU was fused inside the Radeon R9 280 series cards, the Pitcairn GPU was fused inside Radeon R9 270 series cards, the Bonaire GPU was fused inside Radeon R7 260 series and the Cape Verde GPU was fused inside the Radeon R7 250X graphics card. There were some new chips in the lineup which included Tonga and Hawaii which were featuring a better architecture however, these chips still being viable solutions to power gaming and high-performance computing would be fused inside the Radeon 300 series cards. The bulk of the architectural and performance enhancements would be adopted by the Fiji GPU which is AMD's flagship offering. A preliminary look (not a final look) could be found in an article we covered showing different GPUs which may become a part of the Radeon 300 series family.

The Fiji GPU is what’s going to go inside AMD’s successor to the Radeon R9 290X and Radeon R9 290. Initially, only two chips are to be expected, Fiji XT and Fiji Pro featured inside the Radeon R9 390X and Radeon R9 390. There’s no confirming to what specifications these might hold but the top chip will be featured inside the dual chip Radeon R9 395X2 offering. Some specifications that have been previously revealed point out to 4096 cores and a 4 GB, 4096-bit (1024-bit per channel) HBM memory. The chip will be the first to adopt SK Hynix’s HBM memory design stacking layers upon layers of fast memory on the GPU die.We haven’t seen any samples or representation of what the GPU might look like but we are soon to get a glimpse at the product if launch is close. The Fiji GPU will utilize the latest GCN 1.3 graphics architecture from what is rumored in the details.

Making it simple, the Fiji GPU will power the Radeon R9 390 series cards and is a totally new chip. It will also be adopted by the dual-chip card codenamed Bermuda however we cannot confirm that. The rest of the lineup is made of Grenada which is a new name for the Hawaii GPU and going inside the Radeon R9 380 series. There is not going to be any physical change to the architecture but more of a clock speed bump. The Tonga GPU will be going inside the Radeon R9 370 series and the Trinidad GPU will be going inside the Radeon R7 360 series. Now one thing this rumors points out is that AMD's entry level chip would still be Bonaire instead of Tonga which is quite surprising. Trinidad was meant to feature a 256-bit bus and 2 GB GDDR5 VRAM while Bonaire features a 1-2 GB GDDR5 VRAM along a 128-bit bus interface. So it's either possible that Trinidad is a new name for Tonga and AMD will retain the 256-bit bus interface as they did with the Radeon R9 285 and Radeon R9 M295X or the Bonaire GPU is simply not the Radeon R7 360 series chip as mentioned in this report. I'll lean towards the first bit since that seems more likely but this being a speculation, I can't just point out to what's actually going to happen in the upcoming months.

Alleged Codenames of Upcoming AMD Radeon 300 Series GPUs: