So I just got a mysterious package originating from Toronto, from the offices of AMD’s public relations firm. Inside was an envelope containing only this incredibly unsettling sight:
Yes, that’s me, trolling the person who was taking my picture at the time. That image has now been doubled up and deployed against me. I have no defense against such a thing.
I guess don’t troll people taking your picture if you don’t want this to happen, huh?
I’m not sure I’d agree that two is better than one in this particular case, guys.
Anyhow, other than the terrifying picture and cryptic text, the only other clue included is a hashtag on the flip side of the photo:
Searching for the #2betterthan1 hashtag on Twitter doesn’t yield much of anything, but perhaps that will change.
In the meantime, we’re left to speculate about the meaning of this chilling dossier. My best guess is that AMD must be prepping a dual-GPU follow-up to the Radeon HD 7990 based on the big Hawaii chip in the Radeon R9 290X. Surely that’s what’s happening here, right?
statistically, i’m probably bigger than you.
amd played up their NATIVE IS BETTER QUAD CORES and then got stomped. I MAY have forgotten dual cores existed.
and im 30. idk if punk is the right term. man child maybe?
Good lord you’re an ignorant little punk.
Aw, isn’t it nice when children with absolutely no knowledge of GPGPU programming (or the resultant software…OR the usability/validity of data) lend their opinion on topics so clearly above their head?
Firstly, AMD’s GPUs provide significantly more single precision than *any* nvidia product on the market.
Do tell, which nvidia GPU provides >5 tf per die of single precision and 2.7 tf double precision? Oh that’s right, none.
Secondly, please tell me what the single:double precision ratio is of all desktop-class nvidia except the laughably inaccurately named ‘titan’? A mere fraction of AMD’s divider.
Now, I want you to explain what *exactly* you use double precision for without ECC if you want accurate results? Nothing. Oh, of course you don’t know anything about this subject, so how would you know?
Let me summarize: nvidia does not have a single competing product in the desktop or pro space….NOT ONE. Not in integer compute, not in single precision compute, not in double precision compute.
Also, you don’t know a god damned thing.
Never speak about GPGPU again until you have working CUDA (DEAD hand-holding API for amateurs) and OpenCL kernels you’ve developed yourself, little kid.
Okay, where is it? Out with it, AMD!
Where can I buy this amazing card?
It is going to be cherry-picked 290 x 2 solution with slightly lower clock speeds than a regular 290 so it can managed to keep itself without PCIe power specs.
It will beat the GTX Titan at gaming, but at GPGPU stuff it will still lose to anything that requires floating performance.
MSRP $999 that will go easily into $1200+ range due to the current cryptocurrency madness and rarity of the product.
Okay then, you should have warned the viewer.
Simple math would tell you that only 667 would be needed. The last one only because of rounding… 😉
I wasn’t warning the viewer, I was warning Scott that he has a doppelgänger on the loose via the picture. If it’s not your type of humour that’s fine, but I also don’t really care since humour is completely subjective. I’m actually quite surprised about the reaction from commenters, you guys need to loosen up a bit.
If two is better than one, then surely four is better than two…
[url<]http://i230.photobucket.com/albums/ee120/JustAnEngineer/Games/R9-Quad-Damage.jpg[/url<]
-2000? How many gold subscriptions have you purchased?
Not enough of a warning. -1
Not even funny. -2000
-1 for wanting more? Pffft, how boring!
Thanks for the explanation. My school-level geology has worn off in the last 6 years…
Yeah, since the move to general-ish purpose compute shaders, shouldn’t any change in DX feature set just be a drive change away?
Burn it, burn it now!!!!
Smile for the camera Scott.
[url<]http://www.sweclockers.com/nyhet/18449-rykte-amd-forbereder-grafikkort-med-dubbla-hawaii-grafikkretsar[/url<] You're becoming quite famous.
This wouldn’t come as a surprise, AMD likes to challenge the adage “less is more”. Personally I have been mulling over the prospect of dual (if not quad) Maxwell GPUs. I understand why AMD would go this direction and I don’t blame them for going there; but, I am not sure how, should nvidia decide to play the same game with Maxwell’s low power and cooling profiles, AMD will win. Maybe they are seeing the writing on the wall and trying to get a dual chip on the market first?
Double the Damage, double the fun?
Cheerleader. My financial situation is…not good…but I gave something.
I don’t think is is what it is, and I wouldn’t buy it if it was, but I kind of like the idea. 🙂
Lava is molten rock from a volcano or other igneous activity on the surface of the earth (aka an extrusive igneous rock); magma is typically molten rock residing in the crust – often only the top few km since it can typically only form at comparatively low pressure, although it can form at the base of the crust as well. If it cools and solidifies before it hits the surface it forms an intrusive igneous rock. There’s very little magma in the mantle itself (melts [i<]can[/i<] occur there though - especially where relatively cool crust is forced into the much hotter mantle at subduction zones, and hot-spots like Hawaii have magma that originates in the mantle). The mantle itself is solid but can undergo plastic deformation. /nitpicky ex-geologist 🙂
LOL, if true, the incredibly power hungry and hot HD 7990 gets even hotter and power hungry chips! Minimum 1000 Watt PSU ?
There needs to be a “High Temp” speck AMD motherboard to mount it to (with extra support mounts for the cards weight… codename… Pompeii…
Yeah, when magma is released to the surface through volcanic activity, it’s termed as lava.
Though i can’t remember clearly whether breaking through the surface was a necessary condition for it to be called lava…
It’s supposed to use an externally (to the house/building) mounted heat exchanger in the Arctic and Antarctic circles, and is only recommended for cryptocurrency miners who can’t afford heating.
Hahaha dude you should have like +27 for this.
It’s about gd time somebody got off their asses and started making a new dual GPU card. Now stop annoying me with teasing (I hate corporate teasing) and put the damned thing on the market already. Grrrr!
Hmmm, I have changed my mind about the subscriptions. As a gold member, I think I should be able to choose to automatically lowercase any all-caps postings anywhere on the site.. And automatically give six (6) downvotes, even if I don’t read the article or posting. Hell, even if I don’t access the site that day. Or get out of bed.
Should we set up a kickstarter campaign to permanently ban SSK’s Caps Lock key? I would also donate to that very worthy cause.
Will this be something like the [url=http://www.arctic.ac/us_en/products/cooling/vga/accelero-hybrid.html<]Arctic Cooling Accelero Hybrid[/url<]?
They mentioned it will have a water cooler.
And Hawaii is one of the Volcanic Islands so the dual Hawaii card probably will be lava hot.
So’s the single. 😉
No, that’s lava.
Isn’t magma above the Earth’s mantle?
Gonna be a monster card if true.
Not really worried about the power requirements, after all, isn’t that what those kilowatt + PSUs are for?
Can’t wait for their product launches to be called Pompeii and for the upcoming Magma programming interface: even closer to the metal than Mantle! It’ll be hot among developers.
As long as it doesn’t take out nearby settlements, everything should be OK.
My R9 290 is watercooled, I’ve got it set up so that it’s kept to a maximum of 40 deg. C. If this rumoured dual card is shipped with the rumoured water+air cooler I imagine it’ll be fine.
Test
Edit: Okay, subscription didn’t go through.
Will it run as hot?
Looks like the Xbox One also supports it, or atleast they hint at it: [url<]http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/p/directx12.aspx.[/url<] See Xbox logo at the bottom. This should mean that GCN also already supports it, since Xbox uses GCN.
I guess I’m late to the party, but if the rumoured codename is correct, I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek humour of calling a dual R9 290 card “Vesuvius”.
2better1cup
Assuming it starts out at $800, probably north of $2k?
#NSFW
I wonder what miners will inflate the price of it to.
A word of warning …
[url<]http://bbsimg.ngfiles.com/1/19993000/ngbbs4aa8a2eccbc56.jpg[/url<]
What if you already had a twin? Would AMD be sending out pictures of the four of you?
Put 2 chips on a card, charge 4X a single card, and sell it to the coinheads. DoubleDamage.
Good photo placement… Covering all the delicate bits. XD
I really have no other idea other then a double GPU. I assume that’s too obvious though, what else could it be?
Speaking of crossfire, when are we going to get the XDMA review?
Going for a Chuckula impression today?
Are you a cheer leader or are you initiating a series of beg-athon posts now that donators are openly recognized?
this came out last week..
[url<]http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/34158-asus-working-on-dual-hawaii-xt-based-graphics-card[/url<] "According to a fresh rumor coming from Chinese VR-Zone, Asus is working on a custom built dual-GPU Hawaii XT based ROG ARES III graphics card which should be ready in time for Computex 2014."
Christmas ornament…..
Damn, that one is at least a decade old around here.
I’ll toss some bucks on the pile for those terms.
You can have one if you turn in your Caps Lock and Shift keys…
Probably true, I forkedover a few bucks because that was all I could right that second but would be willing to chip in more once another $20ish gets me to Gold.
Down to $51 now, expect it will keep falling as the generous regulars have donated and you get more contributions for a few dollars.
Wouldn’t it be nice if this were the return of dual-CPU systems for the standard desktop chips? I’d hate to see the performance per watt, but that metric doesn’t really seem to matter very much to AMD atm.
They open the floodgates to FX chips going two per system and there will be people screaming to the heavens to build themselves a “16-core” monster PC for not a lot of money.
Madness ensues.
Otherwise, I imagine they’ll be trumpeting their dongle-less Crossfire now that Mantle is on the verge of being forgotten with the buzz around new versions of DirectX and the renewed focus on OpenGL due to the long shadow of SteamOS and tablet gaming’s sudden importance.
A R9 299X would be a new level of crazy in the performance per watt and temperature categories. Given the R9 290X’s “take” on cooling and temperatures, I can only imagine people slapping two of them into the same system for Quadfire.
“You should not fret if the temperatures, heat levels, or sounds coming from your system seem excessive. It’s rated for it. Don’t worry unless you smell smoke, see sparks, and/or hear a demonic voice echoing from the innards of your PC. If you do happen to experience the highly unlikely summoning of a demonic entity, please first visit your local mental health expert and/or tumor specialist. If they clear you for continued living your life free of an institution, then you should then consider contacting an exorcist. Quadfire is not for the queasy or weak-willed.”
Madness ensues.
wow scott ever since #2betterthan1 event you’ve been microstuttering a lot
This is good.
2 Scott’s mean twice as more articles!
Or 1 Scott can go to all those events and use telepathy with the other Scott who will write the articles for us.
This is a win for us!
Not to mention a bunch of other reasons:
– DX12 isn’t out yet
– Games won’t utilize DX12 fully for a while yet
– We don’t have a release date for DX12
– We don’t know anything about DX12 aside from the lower overhead
Then you’d better fork up some cash. It’s like $70ish last I looked
DX12 might just require new drivers, if the main focus is on lowering overhead. Plus don’t AMD and nVidia usually have features that end up getting rolled into the next DX? Hawaii might already support the DX12 features, hardware-wise.
Hey I was going to say that!
Tom Arnold is losing his hair in that pic!
on another note, whats the point of releasing yet another DX11 card if DX12 is on the way?
LIKE, LMAOROTFLOMG, I am sooooo impressed at the inconspicuousness of the caps lock!
quad cores then.
Obviously #2betterthan1 means they will have two coolers, one on either side, for the first ATX-only GPU spanning triple slots on each side. Because 6 is better than 2.
2 Scott Wassons in the world means that the time to complete the cornhole tournament at TR BBQ will double. If we also add 2 JBIs, we’re talking Test Cricket.
What’s his gaffe of the week?
Think liquid sodium cooling. It was once a hot (heh) prospect for small nuclear reactors, like on subs. Problem is, you can’t ever turn off the heat source or it freezes.
What? The Athlon 64 X2s didn’t suck at all when they first came out.
My real name is josh. you can find me on twitter.
I found the original picture in an anandtech blog post, it’s even scarier!!
[url<]http://www.anandtech.com/show/7368/amd-gpu-product-showcase-live-blog[/url<] Avert your eyes: images.anandtech.com/doci/7368/GPU14-005.jpg
I read that as “I be Tits Adual” which made me wonder if that’s your real name or just a nom de plume.
Putting two 290X chips on one card seems like a dumb idea when they’re not making enough cards that only have one.
An R9-295x with 8 GiB would be insane, and so would it’s heat output and power consumption. There’s no way they can trim down TWO 300W hawaii GPUs with 8 gig, 1024-bit power-hungry into a dual, heck, even trip-slot cooler. I don’t know what to think of this.
290X’s locally are going for $680.
I SAW THAT AND I LOVED IT TOO. TITS [i<] ARE [/i<] GREAT!
Oh also, you can figure out addresses from zip+4’s. Not sure if you care or not, but since you seemed to cover the rest of the address…
I don’t know, it looks like a tennis ball.
You sure they didn’t send this to your wife?
More like $2000+ if the mining craze continues by the time the dual 290X launches. Just look at the prices of the 290Xs and 290s.
Could be the first consumer card we see going for $1500+ on newegg.
PCper also got a similar photoshop surprise: [url<]http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Teasing-Dual-GPU-Graphics-Card-Punks-Me-Same-Time[/url<]
No, Scott, they didn’t use Photoshop on this one. They actually got some of your hair when you weren’t looking, extracted your DNA from them, and made not one, but TWO clones of you.
Yep, this has been AMD’s secret project all along. You see, it’s not that their R&D expenditures on processors are too high, it’s because they’ve been spending quite a lot on their human cloning project. They started out cloning Intel chips and now they’re cloning people.
They must be referring to the double MSRP price that AMD cards are being sold at.
1) That was a fun hello to get in the mail.
2) If it is a dual 290…Dear mother…
3) Bummed I can’t view these in 4MP. :p
Well they also don’t want to flood the market with chips and have stock that won’t sell if/when the crypto-currency bubble pops.
There’s basically no good way for AMD correct shortages or price [s<]gouging[/s<] inflation without hurting themselves =\
Ah yes, ye olde “release a dual chip card instead of allocating the chips to single GPU cards that are low stock / high demand and allow GPU prices to remain inflated” move.
=(
There is an upcoming Asus dual R90X card that has a 500W TDP. I’m pretty sure it comes with a water cooler for obvious reasons.
EDIT: Hm, where did the article about the Asus card go? Google isn’t showing it.
EDIT2: Here’s a substitute (this article was written 4 days ago, probably before TR got that odd special mail): [url<]http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2014/03/08/amds-dual-290x-graphics-card-is-just-a-rumor-but-heres-why-it-definitely-exists/[/url<] EDIT4: I just realized that the crypto-coin miners are probably drooling at the idea of a dual R290X. Twice the hashrates for the same amount of expensive PCI-E risers, mobos, CPUs and RAM needed for the base rig.
TOTALLY!
Your first sentence now starts out with: I-BE-TIT’S.
I definitely understand your point now.
I WANT A GOLD SUBSCRIBER THING.
i’ll do it on the first sentence, and you tell me if it helps.
is it better?
You really need to remove all spaces from your posts to make them more readable.
Brings a terrifying new meaning to the phrase “creamy smoothness” doesn’t it?
also, it’s from toronto, was there any crack in the package?
IBETIT’SADUALCOREGPU. NOT THAT FAKE DUAL CORE CPU’S THAT INTEL MAKES, OR FAKE DUAL GPU CARDS NVIDIA MAKES, BUT A REAL DUAL CORE ON THE DIE GPU CHIP LIKE AMD MADE FIRST. THIS IS REAL GUYS. THIS IS THE REAL DUAL CORE GPU. IT’S SCIENCE, AND YOU GUYS ARE GOING TO BE SO IMPRESSED WITH AMD’S FIRST REAL DUAL CORE (THAT WILL BE SLOWER THAN THE COMPETITION, COME OUT WAY SUPER LATE AND SUCK LIKE THEIR FIRST DUAL CORE CPU’S) THAT YOU’RE GOING TO SAY “OOOOO MMMMM GGGGGG THAT SSK NEEDS A COLUMN!!”
That is ingenious marketing, and hilarious. Love it.
Don’t forget to subscribe Theo…any amount will help TR!
The “dual-Scott” picture is a bit terrifying…
I love it.
May very well be about a dual Hawaii chip. Personnal guess, dual graphics improvements with the APU and dGPU.
My theory is that advanced cloning and mind duplication techniques are now viable and after obtaining cells from your beer mug / napkin / plate AMD PR has ensured that there are in fact two Scott Wassons in the world–a truly terrifying thought.
As with two GPUs, two Scotts leads to double the performance–so a win-win for both Scotts.
It’s the only rational explanation that makes sense.
I PREDICT AN MSRP OF ABOUT $2.79 AND AN ACTUAL ON-SALE MINING ADJUSTED PRICE OF $7990.
Certainly looks that way.