AMD Fury X Will NOT Be Limited To 30K Units For 2015 – Air Cooled Versions Are In Fact Coming

Just like everyone else we’ve just heard rumors of AMD’s Fury X being limited to 30,000 units for 2015 and only coming with Liquid Cooling. And simply put those rumors are nothing more than that, rumors. In fact it took us less than 40 minutes to confirm with some of our most reliable sources which are very close to AMD that this was nothing more than baseless speculation.

So worry not there will be plenty of Fiji chips to go around, both wet and dry. In fact we exclusively said four months ago that the chip will come with both air and liquid cooling solutions. A couple of days ago we detailed the air cooling solution for Fiji and explained that it will be a triple fan design, rather than a traditional blower. You should check out that article if you haven’t already, we also dove deep into the specifications for Fury X and Fury in that same exclusive piece.

AMD Fury X Will NOT Be Limited To 30K Units For 2015 – Air Cooled Versions Are In Fact Coming

As for the 30K unit rumor, well we were very suspicious of it from the very beginning, I’ll explain why in a bit. But we ran it by our most reliable and closest sources to AMD just to make sure, these sources have never let us down before not even once just as an FYI. And lo and behold they quickly and decisively told us that it was a load of “insert worthless object here”.  So there you have it folks.

And now I can come to that explanation I mentioned above. Despite the decisive confirmation from our sources that particular rumor simply sounded illogical to us and let me explain why. The rumor wants us to believe that during 2015 only 30,000 Fury X units will be made. There are several serious issues with that claim.

First a little bit of history, in November of last year at the UBS technology conference. AMD’s Vice President and General Manager of the Graphics Business Unit, Matt Skynner revealed that It actually costs between $250 million to upwards of a billion dollars to design a GPU. The main determinant of cost would be the size and complexity of the GPU. As larger and more complex chips will require longer design lead times as well as more testing and validation work.

Fiji is undoubtedly the largest and most complex GPU AMD has ever created. So we’re inclined to believe that its design cost will be much closer the upper limit mentioned by Skynner. This would in turn mean that AMD would need to sell millions of the GPU just to recoup the investment. Now back to the rumor…

30,000 Fury X units translate to $30,000,000 in revenue for AMD in a best case scenario where each individual Fiji XT chip is sold for $1000. Which we don’t think it will, but let’s assume that for argument’s sake. That’s $30 million in revenue in 6 months, half a year. Which would mean $15 million a quarter. Even if we assume that the quantity will double next year and the price will remain the same that is still just $90 million of overall revenue by the middle of next year. At which point AMD is likely to introduce its 16nm Arctic Islands GPUs and stop selling 28nm GPUs all together.

You can quickly see the problem here, at that rate, which the rumor is suggesting, AMD would need to keep selling Fury X for $1000 for more than 9 years just to make back the development cost in revenue, which means it would need to sell it for even longer to make any profit.  And that’s simply illogical.

Discrete GPUs sell by the tens of millions each year, high-end GPUs alone sell by the millions. And that’s why companies like AMD and Nvidia recoup their investments fairly quickly.  If the rumor had indicated that the first batch of Fury X cards would be limited to 30 units, perhaps in the first month, that maybe would’ve been believable, not for the entire backhalf of 2015. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if whomever made up this rumor doesn’t even have a fundamental understanding of how the industry works. Thankfully our sources left no room for speculation and completely refuted the rumored claims.

Below you can check out the specifications for Fury X and Fury as well as pricing for the upcoming Radeon 300 series.

WCCFTech	AMD Radeon R9 Fury X2	AMD Radeon R9 Fury X	AMD Radeon R9 Nano	AMD Radeon R9 Fury	AMD Radeon R9 290X
GPU	Fiji XT x 2	Fiji XT	Fiji XT	Fiji Pro	Hawaii XT
Stream Processors	8192	4096	4096	3584	2816
GCN Compute Units	128	64	64	56	44
Render Output Units	128	64	64	64	64
Texture Mapping Units	512	256	256	224	176
GPU Frequency	TBA	Up to 1050Mhz	Up to 1000 MHz	Up to 1000 MHz	1000Mhz
Memory	8GB HBM (4 GB Per Chip)	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	4GB HBM	4GB GDDR5
Memory Interface	4096-bit x 2	4096bit	4096bit	4096bit	512bit
Memory Frequency	500Mhz	500Mhz	500 MHz	500Mhz	1250Mhz
Effective Memory Speed	1Gbps	1Gbps	1Gbps	1Gbps	5Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	1024 GB/s	512GB/s	512GB/s	512GB/s	320GB/s
Cooling	Liquid	Liquid, 120mm Radiator	Air, Single Fan. Custom AIB Solutions Later	Air, Custom AIB Solutions	Air, Single Blower Fan
Performance (SPFP)	17.2 TFLOPS	8.6 TFLOPS	8.19 TFLOPS	7.2 TFLOPS	5.6 TFLOPS
TDP	TBA	275W	175W	275W	250W
Power Connectors	Dual 8-Pin	Dual 8-Pin	8-Pin	Dual 8-Pin	6+8 Pin
GFLOPS/Watt	TBA	31.3	47.1	26.2	19.3
New Prices	TBA	$649	$499	$549	$299 (Retail)
Launch Date	Early 2016	24th June 2015	7th September 2015	10th July 2015	24th October 2013

Segment	Graphics Card	GPU	MSRP
Enthusiast	R9 390X 8GB	Enhanced Hawaii XT	$429
Enthusiast	R9 390 8GB	Enhanced Hawaii Pro	$329
Performance	R9 380 4GB	Tonga Pro	$225
Performance	R9 380 2GB	Tonga Pro	$195
Performance	R7 370 4GB	Pitcairn Pro	$165
Performance	R7 370 2GB	Pitcairn Pro	$135
Performance	R7 360 2GB	Bonaire Pro	$107

 

As always stay tuned for the latest and greatest and share your thoughts in the comments below.