AMD is preparing its tiny Radeon R9 Nano for release very soon, so the first concrete details are surfacing for the mini-ITX graphics card. The smallest member of the AMD Radeon Fury family, the R9 Fury will be the most powerful graphics card designed for mini-ITX in existence, with early benchmarks indicating performance fairly comparable to the fully fledged R9 Fury X.
On the specifications side of things, the Radeon R9 Nano comes loaded with a Fiji GPU, packing 4096 stream processors on 64 compute units, 256 TMUs, 64 ROPS, and 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory clocked at 1GHz, all set in on a mammoth 4096-bit memory interface. If you needed any confirmation of the performance of this diminutive card, the Radeon R9 Nano has compute performance of 8.19 TFLOPS, just shy of the 8.6 TFLOPS for the Fury X.
Aside from the size, perhaps what’s most impressive about the R9 Nano is that it actually runs at 100W less than the Radeon R9 Fury X, consuming just 175W through a single 8-pin power connector. This is some impressive performance efficiency, somewhere in the region of double the performance per watt of AMD’s previous flagship, the Radeon R9 290X.
One of the major reasons AMD has managed to squeeze so much performance into something so small is the use of HBM. The 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory has a fair smaller footprint than the equivalent GDDR5 memory. While it operates at a far lower clock rate, the massive 4096-bit memory interface allows it to operate at 512 GB/s bandwidth.
Over to the performance side of things and a leaked chart gives us a good idea of where we can expect the R9 Nano to slot in. This is reportedly benchmark results from Far Cry 4 ran at 4K resolution, with the R9 Nano averaging about 33 frames per second. This puts it marginally above the R9 290X and around 8 or 9 frames per second behind the Fury X.
Where the Radeon R9 Nano makes the biggest ground is in the performance per watt, where it absolutely annihilates both the Fury X and the R9 290X, almost doubling the figures of the latter. Lower power consumption would be a big win for AMD, who have struggled up against the efficiency of Nvidia's Maxwell of late. Lower TDP means lower temperatures, making the R9 Nano a tempting purchase for smaller builds.
The final part of the puzzle now is the pricing. We're expecting a premium on the smaller component, but if AMD can get this right then this graphics card could be an absolute winner for the enthusiast market.
The embargo for these documents is up tomorrow, so look out for plenty more info on the Radeon R9 Nano then, when AMD will hopefully be announcing launch details.
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