Long live the Tonga!, oh wait, did AMD just pull the plug on full Tonga?
According to Robert Hallock’s tweet, this might actually be true:
@Sceiren We are only releasing the R9 285. ^RH
— AMD Radeon Graphics (@AMDRadeon) September 16, 2014
Apparently very aggressive pricing of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 970 (rumored to retail at $330), has made AMD change their plans for the future of R9 285 series. Maxwell GM204-200 (the GPU of GTX 970) would be a direct competitor for R9 285X.
Earlier this month AMD released Radeon R9 285, equipped with Tonga PRO featuring 1792 Stream Processors.
Tonga XT is a chip with 2048 cores. It was scheduled to launch in the last week of September (at least according to the documents I possess) with Radeon R9 285X.
Hopefully this is just a misunderstanding, and we are yet to see the full power of Tonga (this is such a cool name for GPU, isn’t it?).
Tonga PRO block diagram
via ComputerBase
