When AMD revealed the Radeon Pro Duo during the Capsaicin event, the actual product looked significantly different to the one AMD showed at last year’s E3 conference. In fact, it was a completely different product. Besides an occasional leak, destiny of AMD’s ‘Gemini’ board was unknown for the better part of 2015. In this article, we will reveal the full story of how Radeon Pro Duo came to be.
The original plan to launch AMD’s “Radeon R9 Fury X2” for gamers changed with the announcement of Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), a new organisation inside AMD led by Raja Koduri, specifically designed to focus on AMD’s FirePro, Radeon and now also Radeon Pro lines. RTG will drive the adoption of in-house designed technologies throughout AMD product line-up, as well as current and future licensees. AMD is known for licensing its IP to 3rd parties – such as processors inside Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4 console. Same story with Nintendo’s (Wii and Wii U consoles), meaning AMD has a 100% share in contemporary gaming consoles.
Fiji GPU brought revolutionary packaging, meaning RTG and AMD wanted to create halo products based on halo architecture. Given that Polaris and Zen, top-to-bottom shift to 14nm FinFET were a generation away, the decision came to design three families of future products based around Fiji, continuing onto Polaris / Zen. The RTG team decided to scrap a high-end gaming product and merge the ‘best of Radeon and best of FirePro’ into a single product. End result is the birth of prosumer Radeon Pro family, with Radeon Pro Duo being the first product.
Project Quantum was invented to demonstrate record performance in the smallest form factor.
Codenamed Gemini, R9 Fury X2 was originally designed as a discrete part that can fit inside AMD’s Project Quantum, a ‘computer for VR’ concept which made its debut alongside the Fiji family of products. This was also the first product from AMD to make it to the mainstream media in quite some time and carried a global appeal. Regardless of what you may think about this product, we think that this is one sexy piece of hardware, and received open approval from my wife and her female friends as ‘computer they would buy’.
Unfortunately, AMD hit the same limitations with the supply chain as Razer encountered when they wanted green USB ports. The state of current supply chain simply isn’t geared to support an innovative form factor such as Project Quantum. In our conversations with RTG’s leadership, we learned that they did not give up on ‘Project Quantum’, and the second window just might be the launch of ZEN architecture.
With Project Quantum being pushed onto the back-burner, green light was given to create an uncompromising design merging consumer and commercial aspects, the Radeon Pro Duo.
Learning From R9 Fury X And Fury X2 (Gemini)
Built for Project Quantum, AMD Gemini prototype sports two Fiji GPUs.
Picture above shows the original R9 Fury X2 (engineering prototype). Engineers behind the board demonstrated to AMD’s management that Fiji GPU can drive new, previous unimaginable form factors. Gemini design removed any internal doubt that R9 Nano can be a viable product. Personally, out of all Fiji-based graphics cards, I prefer the compact design and incredible compute performance from ITX-focused R9 Nano.
Gemini was designed to feed the GPus with 375 Watts; 300 Watts came from two 8-pin PEG connectors (seen in the right corner) and 75 Watts came through the motherboard. Given design of PCI Express bus, there was a valid concern that continuous load on data paths on with continuous draw of 75 Watts could lead to instability in some of motherboards on the market. The Gemini board was literally two Nanos next to each other – albeit at a lower clock. The prototype delivered 12 TFLOPS of single and 0.75 TFLOPS of double precision compute performance. Samples could achieve R9 Nano clock and performance (16 TFLOPS SP, 1 TFLOPS DP), but the margin for power delivery was minimal; ~355W out of 375W available.
One upping the original Gemini design proved to be an easy task for the hardware engineers, and a daunting task for its liquid cooling partner, Cooler Master. Spec for Radeon Pro Duo called for professional or industrial grade design capable of qualifying in workstation systems. In a way, this graphics card is more a FirePro than a Radeon. Engineers at AMD and Cooler Master used the same specifications demanding durability and 60-month, 5 year ’50/25/20/5′ cycle (50% full load, 25% half-load, 20% idle, 5% off). This is the first time AMD used FirePro workstation / server design guidelines for a consumer/prosumer product.
Limited number of R9 Fury X boards suffered from coil whine (chokes are marked red). Green markings show the base component of the new power design
See full post at VR WORLD.
Please do look up other posts like: