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AMD Unveils Radeon R9 Nano, Targets Mini ITX Gaming Systems With a New Fury

Posted by timothy on from the pantera's-box-you-do-not-wanna-open dept.

MojoKid writes: AMD today added a third card to its new Fury line that's arguably the most intriguing of the bunch, the Radeon R9 Nano. True to its name, the Nano is a very compact card, though don't be fooled by its diminutive stature. Lurking inside this 6-inch graphics card is a Fiji GPU core built on a 28nm manufacturing process paired with 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). It's a full 1.5 inches shorter than the standard Fury X, and unlike its liquid cooled sibling, there's no radiator and fan assembly to mount. The Fury Nano sports 64 compute units with 64 stream processors each for a total of 4,096 stream processors, just like Fury X. It also has an engine clock of up to 1,000MHz and pushes 8.19 TFLOPs of compute performance. That's within striking distance of the Fury X, which features a 1,050MHz engine clock at 8.6 TFLOPs. Ars Technica, too, takes a look at the new Nano.

60 comments

  1. as an engineer I couldnt be happier by nimbius · · Score: 4, Funny

    I purchased an ITX system with this radeon as part of a project ive been working on. The system runs a complex thermodynamics application, Crysis 3, in order to physically model stresses on nuclear containment vessels during a meltdown.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:as an engineer I couldnt be happier by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Almost attacked you for claiming to be running a GPU that's not even supposedly on sale for 2 more weeks.
      Then I got the sarcasm.
      Nicely played.

  2. Nano vs. Fury X by Tsolias · · Score: 1

    Ok, the full fat Fiji chip is tempting, but I'd expect a 50$ less MSPR due to the cheaper cooling solution. The Nano is a wonderfull suloution for those who use a eGPU for gaming. I'd like to see a Gaming box w/ a small factor PSU and a mPCI-e cord.

    1. Re:Nano vs. Fury X by spire3661 · · Score: 1

      Video card in an external box is an idea that just needs to die already. ITs not going to happen any time soon. Yes i know there are some limited solutions out there, but it will never go beyond niche.

      --
      Good-bye
    2. Re:Nano vs. Fury X by Tsolias · · Score: 1

      You do realize though that it is a very convenient solution for those who do not want a Desktop along with their laptop and do not want to waste several thousands on an expensive laptop with a mid-range desktop GPU that overheats the laptop. The only drawback with eGPUs is that laptops do not come with x2,x4,x8 or x16 pcie slots. Everything is done via the wifi's x1 PCIe. (the ultrabay on my y410p is a proprietary x8 connector)

  3. Well, I read *that* headline wrong by island_earth · · Score: 0

    I thought at first that AMD unveiled it "with a new furry" and I thought, finally, an interesting Slashdot story. Maybe some kind of platypus/monkey hybrid or something. But I was disappointed.

    1. Re:Well, I read *that* headline wrong by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

      That way --> to the Geek Hierarchy chart

      Bringing this back on topic: Disappointed with new tech? Welcome to the club. Hardware has become so stagnant in the last 5 years. 28nm. *yawn*. Yet-another-Megaherz or "core". /sarcasm Yay.

      When are the GPU OEM's going to move to 22 nm?

      When the hell is Knights Corner going to be ready for the masses?

      Business as usual. Smaller, Faster, Cheaper.

      When is the next (tech) revolution going to happen?

    2. Re:Well, I read *that* headline wrong by Kjella · · Score: 2

      Bringing this back on topic: Disappointed with new tech? Welcome to the club. Hardware has become so stagnant in the last 5 years. 28nm. *yawn*. Yet-another-Megaherz or "core". /sarcasm Yay. (...) When is the next (tech) revolution going to happen?

      Actually I feel we've had several since the PC revolution. There was the network revolution with the Internet. The mobile revolution that lets you use it anywhere, any time. And with fiber rolling out I'd say we're in the middle of a bandwidth revolution. Even if you extrapolate like crazy going from 8GB to 16GB RAM isn't going to feel like going from 8MB to 16MB. The changes were huge because there was so much you couldn't do with 8MB, there's not so much you can't do with 8GB. Welcome back to the real world, where cars and planes don't go twice as fast with double the capacity and mileage three years later. Has it actually bugged you that you don't have terahertz processors or terabytes of RAM or petabytes of storage lately? I can't really say that I have, I often wish shit would work better but it's not because they lack hardware resources. There was a time when the really hardware wasn't capable even if you wrote optimized assembler, today it's 99.99% the software that's not capable.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  4. Read: Steam Machines by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They're probably leveraging their console experience to make Valve's experiment work with higher margin cards.

  5. Ars... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No from that site, thanks.

    They are blind microcrap's fanbois.

    1. Re: Ars... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I know, right! Not nearly as impartial as SlishDashers!

  6. Fan choice is extremely poor. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That type of fan design. Useless if you want to shift lots of heat.

    Their top-end cards used the same type of fan, they too couldn't shift the heat fast enough.

    Use Blowers Goddamnit!

  7. no fiji under $500? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    are they insane??

    what does binning for low power usage mean, exactly? less performance, i suppose... and that translates somehow into "luxury product", which is just as pricey as their flagship product? i'm not getting luxury cooling, or luxury performance, but i'm still paying the luxury prices? i am essentially paying more for the silicon of an inferior performing product. what kind of reality distortion field bullshit is this??

    1. Re:no fiji under $500? by cb88 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Specifically it means it leaks less current.. especially when ran at a lower voltage.

      The Fury X and Pro chips may or may not run at the voltage these chips do and they'll probably leak more current even when they do.

      In short... this is a higher efficiency chip. Most likely it would be able to clock higher than Fury X or Pro chips due to less leakage as well given appropriate cooling.

    2. Re:no fiji under $500? by Kjella · · Score: 1

      what does binning for low power usage mean, exactly?

      Some chips perform well with low drive current, think about it like being able to read reasonably well in poor lighting.

      and that translates somehow into "luxury product"

      If lower power usage or being smaller/lighter/quieter is more important than raw performance, it might be. All depends on what you value.

      Anyway, the really big question is the headline which you didn't mention anymore, not what this card is but what it isn't. I expected the Nano to be half the Fury at half the price competing in the $2-300 market, instead it looks like the R300 series is here to stay a while - on the shelves, I think.nVidia must be laughing so hard now, realizing there's nothing new to compete in the GTX960/970 territory for a while.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:no fiji under $500? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Specifically it means it leaks less current.. especially when ran at a lower voltage.

      so, what characteristic allows a piece of silicon to have better insulation at lower currents? that is, all pieces of silicon exhibit this behavior, but what characteristic will cause a certain piece of silicon to be ideal in this respect for lower currents only?

      i'm guessing there is none, and that you're under the impression that the nano bin is just a higher quality chip than the fury x bin. but, in this case, wouldn't it make more sense to use the higher quality chip for an overclocked product? i mean, people would pay more for the fury xx super mega overclocked edition, wouldn't they?

      i think the nano bin is for lower quality chips, and marketing figured out a way to charge suckers more money for the nano chip than they do for the fury x chip.

    4. Re:no fiji under $500? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anyway, the really big question is the headline which you didn't mention anymore, not what this card is but what it isn't. I expected the Nano to be half the Fury at half the price competing in the $2-300 market, instead it looks like the R300 series is here to stay a while - on the shelves, I think.nVidia must be laughing so hard now, realizing there's nothing new to compete in the GTX960/970 territory for a while.

      i'm of a similar mind. at $650, i think there is a bigger market for fury chips that happen to bear an image of jesus or the virgin mary when you tilt them at just the right angle in bright light, than for chips with 90% of the performance of your flagship product but in a mini itx form factor.

      i'm planning an upgrade this thanksgiving, and i'll probably be turning to nvidia for the first time since.. ever.

  8. Card is huge by ickleberry · · Score: 0

    That won't fit in my M350 case anyway. It is nearly the size of the motherboard

  9. Fifteen years. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In 2000, the fastest supercomputer in the world was IBM's ASCI White, with a peak performance of 7.226 TFLOPS. Its theoretical maximum performance was 12.3 TFLOPS. It weighed over 100 tons, and drew 3MW of power, plus another 3MW for cooling.

    One. Six. Inch. Card.

    1. Re:Fifteen years. by NJRoadfan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Somehow this reminded me of 3dfx's old ad campaign.... all that power.... to play games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    2. Re:Fifteen years. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Wrong. That's 7.226 TFlops of DOUBLE PRECISION performance on the supercomputers.
      Even the full-bore Furry-X gets about 0.55 TFlops of double precision and let's optimistically assume that these cut-down parts can still pull 0.5 TFlops. That's 14.452 (round up to 15) cards.

      Now, Knight's Landing? That's about 3 TFlops of double-precision in a single chip, so three CHIPS to beat that supercomputer.. not too shabby.

      Still pretty impressive, but that's just proof that despite the naysayers, Moore's law is alive and well.

    3. Re:Fifteen years. by phorm · · Score: 1

      I haven't seen those before. That was pretty awesome.

      Glad I wasn't drinking anything when I watch it though.

    4. Re:Fifteen years. by tgetzoya · · Score: 2

      I loved these....haven't forgotten about them or 3dfx. Too bad they couldn't get their tech together.

    5. Re:Fifteen years. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They went down when they bought out STB and tried to make their own cards instead of just making chips like nvidia, the making chips to sell to add in vendors ended up being the right business model.

      That stupid mistake of wasting resources to try to produce their own add in boards killed the company.

      http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1119984

      The title should read from our era 15 years on "STB buyout puts 3dfx in jeopardy"

    6. Re:Fifteen years. by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

      Your cell phone packs considerably more compute power than a Cray 1.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    7. Re:Fifteen years. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

      The fact that graphics cards use lower-precision floating-point representations reflects the fact that not all applications need double precision. Single precision is obviously no good for something highly nonlinear and iterative (like CFD), but it's enough for the modeling behind 3D graphics; that's why these single-precision monsters are scaling out (volume of production) so rapidly, right?

      Maybe we can agree on "native precision". I'm not sure ASCI White would have gone much faster if you threw it a problem that required only single precision calculations...?

    8. Re:Fifteen years. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but the Cray 1 was 40 years ago, not 15.

      In other news, I'm apparently old.

  10. 175W by apcullen · · Score: 2

    Do you REALLY want a 175W card in a mini itx system? How are you going to keep it cool?

    1. Re:175W by slazzy · · Score: 0

      Early April fools maybe?

      --
      Website Just Down For Me? Find out
    2. Re:175W by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      With this:

      www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DRA4F06

      It gets air directly from outside the case.

    3. Re:175W by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 2

      Still too big for a mini-ITX case. Why are they still making them so deep? Mini-ITX is square, why are the damn cases still rectangle? How about a tiny tower the same size as the motherboard? Vertical space doesn't cost anything on my desk.

    4. Re:175W by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't put it on your desk?

      For me, mini-ITX = portability for LAN parties or whatever.

      I like that the case can fit a full-length card if i want. The size of that case wasn't the point, though. Get a square ITX case if you want. It can still pull air directly from the outside to cool the card.

    5. Re:175W by slaker · · Score: 2

      And as a related issue, who is making a true SFF power supply big enough to handle that card plus a gaming-class CPU? A lot of "ITX" rigs are built using configured mini-towers (e.g. the Bitfenix Prodigy), but if I wanted to throw one of those in a vanilla case like an Apex MI-08 or Antec ISK-150, their PSUs would die approximately 10 seconds after I fired up Crysis or whatever it is that kids are playing these days.

      --
      -- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
    6. Re:175W by spire3661 · · Score: 1

      I run a 770 GTX and an i5-2500k in a RVZ-01 mini-itx system using a 450 SFX PSU. Absolutely rock solid. Cooling is really only an issue if you want to overclock, stock parts generally run cool enough. IT sits on top of my desk right next to me.

      --
      Good-bye
    7. Re:175W by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Neither of your examples takes a 2-slot full height card, so it doesn't matter anyways.
      And it's not exactly like 600W+ SFX PSUs are particularly hard to find. SilverStone SX600, 5 models from 600 to 800W from Athena Power, ...

    8. Re: 175W by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I run a gtx 980 in a mini itx system, which isnt much less power hungry than that. No weird cooling either. Just make sure your fans are setup for proper airflow with your particular case, and it should work just fine.

    9. Re:175W by sexconker · · Score: 1

      Buy rectangular case.
      Rotate 90 degrees so the front faces upward.
      ???
      Profit.

    10. Re:175W by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 1

      The airflow isn't designed for this orientation.

    11. Re:175W by sexconker · · Score: 2

      All you need is a bit of clearance between the fan and the desk. Put a small bit of wood under each corner.

    12. Re:175W by mrchaotica · · Score: 1

      The Antec ISK-600 fits a full-size ATX PSU and is a very nice case. (I admit, it's bigger than I wanted, but I got it on sale and for $20 I can't complain much.)

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    13. Re:175W by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      The card will keep itself cool, all you need is a case that allows air from the outside to the heatsink and then back outside. Given this would be at the edge of the board, simply having a hole with a fan grill over it would do.

  11. Is it real?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's a full 1.5 inches shorter than the standard Fury X

    Huh? It's shorter than a card that doesn't exist?

    Because I could swear that the Fury X is a myth. I spent over a week trying to buy one - from Newegg, from Amazon, from anywhere. They don't exist. AMD lost me as a customer (I bought a 980 Ti) _just because_ they have some sort of artificial scarcity thing going on every time they "release" a new card.

    1. Re:Is it real?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Newegg search for "r9 fury x" reveals (all buried in the regular R9 Fury results):

      OUT OF STOCK ASUS Radeon R9 Fury X R9FURYX-4G
      OUT OF STOCK XFX R9-FURY-4QFA RADEON R9 FURY X 4GB
      OUT OF STOCK VisionTek Radeon R9 Fury X 900814 4GB

      The only people who own an R9 Fury X are reviewers. This card was a paper launch.

  12. 6 inches of Fury by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    That's all my baby needs

    1. Re:6 inches of Fury by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      6 inches ought to be enough for anybody.

    2. Re:6 inches of Fury by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, but how long?

  13. Re:Too bad... by U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M · · Score: 0

    Too bad they don't fuck ass, that'd be the perfect card to watch anal porn.

  14. It's a shame by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that they couldn't get any smaller fab than the 28nm, which is getting long in the tooth now.

  15. Sorry, no by Yunzil · · Score: 2

    At $450 it would have been intriguing. At $650 it's pointless.

  16. How does this compare to... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How does this card compare to the last discrete video card I ever purchased? A 256 mb Radeon 9600 Pro AGP 4x?

    Slightly faster?

  17. How To Make it cool? by dime123 · · Score: 1

    This will make the device too hot. Wondering how to make it cool...

    1. Re:How To Make it cool? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      heatsinks
      fans
      etc

      scientists invented stuff for this situation

  18. Cellphone? by billstewart · · Score: 1

    I probably have wristwatches with more power than a Cray 1 by now. And a $50 BeagleBoneBlack is probably way faster than a Cray 2. The amount of Moore's Law since the Cray 1 came out is just silly, even though it has slowed down a bit.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
    1. Re:Cellphone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > And a $50 BeagleBoneBlack is probably way faster than a Cray 2.

      Actually, the Cray 2 ran about 1.9 GFLOPs, while the BeagleBone Black runs about 1.6 GFLOPs including the GPU.

  19. AMD = meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    More "looks good on paper" trash by AMD, who can't seem to make drivers for shit. No thanks. AMD is what you buy when you're broke and you don't care if your hardware is broken.

  20. Grandkids by DarthVain · · Score: 1

    Yeah I was kinda of excited until I saw the price... Also while the power savings are considerable, it is still pretty high for an ITX build.

    That said, it is a nice technology showcase. I've been an ATI/AMD fan for awhile, they are still top of the game, at least in GPU anyway. The good thing is, my last build wasn't all that long ago (and it was my first ITX build), so I don't *need* to do another anytime soon. That said, buy the time I do, these babies, or more likely their technological grandbabies will be available, and will likely be smaller, cheaper, and use less power by then anyway!