AMD Hawaii GPU Die Shot Analyzed - Fully Unlocked Chip May Have 48 Compute Units and 3072 Stream Processors

Information technology has been a few months since AMD launched their flagship Hawaii GPU to tackle NVIDIA'southward mammoth GK110 Kepler core. The Hawaii chip does a formidable task confronting its competition offering tons of performance for an admittedly neat value.

Image Credits: TechSpot

AMD Hawaii GPU May Have 48 CUs (3072 Stream Processors)?

Till appointment, we accept seen two variants of the Hawaii chip which have become part of AMD's Volcanic Islands GPU lineup. The Hawaii XT core with 2816 stream processors has been featured inside the Radeon R9 290X while the Hawaii Pro core with 2560 stream processors has been featured inside the Radeon R9 290. Surprisingly, Hawaii based graphics cards are the only in the lineup which feature a new core while other chips are rebrands of older GPUs such equally Cape Verde, Oland, Bonaire, Pitcairn and Tahiti.

The AMD Radeon R9 290X is currently AMD's flagship Hawaii chip and for a while it seemed similar if the Hawaii XT core featured inside the menu was the fully unlocked variant boasting 2816 stream processors, 172 TMUs and 64 ROPs merely a slide posted past DG's Nerdy Story (the first site to leak R9 290X and R7 260X) has unveiled that there's much more the Hawaii flake has still to offer. The Hawaii XT scrap inside the Radeon R9 290X has 4 Compute Units disabled as seen from the dice shot which means that the fully enabled Hawaii bit is withal to launch.

The fully enabled Hawaii GPU as seen from the die shot has 48 Compute Units, 192 Texture Mapping Units and 64 Raster Operators. The 48 Compute units amount to a total of 3072 stream processors. That's the same number of cores once featured on AMD's Radeon Hd 6990 dual-bit graphics bill of fare and besides the same number of cores which are currently available on NVIDIA'south GeForce GTX 690 dual-fleck menu. Although there's no comparison betwixt the cores since all cards are based on unlike architectures just its however a surprise that AMD can integrated such a high number of cores in their flagship chip, NVIDIA'due south GK110 has a maximum 2880 Cuda cadre count on the loftier-performance GeForce GTX 780 Ti and its Tesla/Quadro variants.

Paradigm is courtesy of UDteam.Tistory!

The site'south owner 'DGLee' posted a cursory explanation on Guru3D forums nigh his findings which can be seen below:

Starting time with a Tahiti and Pitcairn die image. Normalize the size of their CU (shader cluster)
At present we earn 6 GDDR5 controllers in Tahiti every bit well as four in Pitcairn, Tahiti's IMC is about three times larger than that of Pitcairn. At this betoken nosotros should remind that Hawaii's 512bit GDDR5 controller is really 30% smaller than Tahiti'due south 384bit controller thank to design-wise simplification of 2^northward width bus. And so it seems very rational that Tahiti has three times bigger IMC than that of Pitcairn.
ROP partitions are (literally) roofing around the shader clusters. Calculated areas (give thanks to MS PPT: I drawed infinitely many rectangles, get their vertical/horizontal lengths and manually multiply them) are surprisingly similar among Tahiti and Pitcairn, which suggests that they actually have the aforementioned amount of ROPs(both apply 32).
Contrary-engineering is done. Nosotros've done almost everything. Etc & Overheads are less than v% of total expanse.
At present the "block-building" time. Start with shaders: Simply multiply 44 or 48 to 'normalized' shader cluster size.
Guess the IMC size of Hawaii. In this case we have two ways to approach: Multiply 0.seven to Tahiti's IMC or ii to Pitcairn'due south - Fortunately, both earn the same value.
Guess the size of ROP sectionalization: I just multiply 2 to Tahiti'due south ROP size(which is same as Pitcairn'due south) because Hawaii have ROPs as twice much as them.
Apply similar ratio for etc & overhead area (= expressionless space). In this case I employ 5%.
Sum them all!

When I apply 44 CUs for Hawaii GPU, I earn 410~415mm2 die size which is quite smaller than its revealed size (438mm2). Interestingly, I could go this number only when I utilize the amont of CUs equal to 48, which ways AMD's highest SKU as of today (=290X) is being shipped as 'not-fully-capable' status. In other words, a full Hawaii GPU has 3072 SP and 192 TMU at the highest probability. via Guru3D Forums

Just in case you are wondering, the current Hawaii GPU block diagram is posted below:

None of this is nevertheless confirmed since AMD hasn't officially confirmed annihilation yet but based on the findings past DG, its a loftier probability that AMD will come up upward with a new Hawaii XTX (let's just call information technology that for now) in the near future if the chip has the mentioned specifications. Practice mail service what you think about this news in the disqus console below: