R9 380X "Fiji" will precede the flagship 390X "Bermuda" GPU by a fairly long amount of time, as could Treasure Island

Sep 30, 2014 07:30 GMT  ·  By

TSMC should have ramped up 20nm semiconductor production by now, but it's still having problems, which is why NVIDIA threw in the towel and released the GeForce GTX 980 and 970 with Maxwell GPUs designed on the 28nm node.

AMD hasn't matched its rival's launch with a high-end graphics card of its own, despite having unveiled the Radeon R9 285 based on the Tonga chip.

According to VR-Zone, the reason behind this is that the Sunnyvale, California-based company is holding off until the first half in 2015. Possibly during the Consumer Electronics Show in January, since that's when the 14nm Intel Broadwell-U CPUs are supposed to be released.

Admittedly, those are laptop CPUs, so they should have little bearing on desktop add-in boards. But AMD may use the Pirate Islands release as counter-hype anyway.

The AMD Radeon R9 300 series

According to the Chinese website, the Radeon R9 380X will be released first, with the Radeon R9 390X set to follow a few weeks or months later on.

The former card will be codenamed Fiji, while the latter will be known as Bermuda. Hopefully, the product won't live up to the namesake in unfortunate ways (ergo, by behaving as strangely and dangerously as the Bermuda triangle is reputed to).

We're not sure exactly what benefits the 20nm fabrication technology will bring along. A lower TDP, certainly, and a higher performance of course, since this is mandatory for all new product generations. Nevertheless, we can't start to speculate on the capabilities of the video boards yet.

That said, in addition to the GeForce GTX 380X and eventually the GTX 390X, there will be a GTX 360X as well. The naming schemes are starting to look really similar between AMD and NVIDIA.

All three should receive HDMI 2.0 ports (better than the current HDMI 1.4) and DisplayPort 1.3 technology.

The method to this madness

AMD is doing pretty much what NVIDIA is doing, basically. NVIDIA has launched GeForce GTX 980 and 970, but no GTX 980X. The GM200 GPU is being held back, probably because NVIDIA wants it to be fabricated on 20nm as well.

AMD just doesn't want to make any concessions, so it's holding the Fiji back as well, along with the chip in the Radeon R9 370X (the Treasure Island), instead of redesigning them for 28nm like NVIDIA did.

We'll be keeping an eye out for follow-up rumors, if any. If we're right and AMD at least speaks of the Radeon R9 300 line at CES, some new leaks should emerge in the coming weeks.