It's been a while since the launch of AMD's high-end R9 200 graphics cards, which means a new flagship might be just around the corner. While we've heard a few tidbits about said flagship before, such as a rumored liquid-air hybrid cooling solution for it, the latest bits of info come directly from AMD themselves. Well, sort of.
References to an upcoming AMD Radeon R9 380X have been discovered on some of the LinkedIn profiles of AMD team members. Ilana Shternshain, ASIC physical design engineer at AMD in San Francisco, has worked on taping out products including the R9 290X and R9 380X, the latter of which she describes as the "largest in "King of the hill" line of products".
Another employee, system architect manager Linglan Zhang, claims to have worked on a new (but unspecified) GPU. Although the information has now been removed from his LinkedIn profile, it previously listed experience developing "the world's first 300W 2.5D discrete GPU SoC using stacked die High Bandwidth Memory and silicon interposer."
A number of those terms are technical buzzwords, but there are a few interesting things to note. First, it has previously been rumored that the R9 300 series of products will include a new type of high-bandwidth memory for significantly improved memory performance. Whether Zhang's statement was in direct reference to the R9 380X or not is unclear, though it seems likely.
It's also curious that the GPU is listed as being 300 watts. The Radeon R9 290X had a TDP of 290W, so a jump to 300W wouldn't be massive. However, companies like Nvidia are gunning for lower power GPUs, with the GeForce GTX 980 flagship packing an impressive TDP of just 165W. You'd hope that AMD would be attempting to compete with Nvidia not just on performance, but also on power efficiency.
The information from LinkedIn is definitely not official confirmation about these products, though we can expect to learn more closer to the undisclosed launch data sometime early this year.