AMD Radeon R9 285 ‘Tonga’ to hit shelves in early September

Advanced Micro Devices plans to release the first details regarding its new code-named “Tonga” graphics processing units already this week and start to sell the Radeon R9 285 graphics cards based on the new GPU in early September, according to a new media report.

AMD intends to reveal some preliminary information about the Radeon R9 285 graphics boards and the “Tonga” GPU during a special event called “Celebrating 30 Years of Graphics & Gaming at AMD” that will take place on Saturday, the 23rd of August, 2014, at 10:00AM EDT/9:00AM CDT/7:00AM PDT/2:00PM GMT/3:00PM U.K. time. The show will commemorate achievements of ATI Technologies (which AMD acquired in 2006) as well as AMD in the field of computer graphics. The event will be hosted by AMD’s chief gaming scientist, Richard Huddy, and will be broadcasted live.

At present it is unclear which details about Tonga does AMD plan to reveal at its show, but it is likely that the event will cover AMD’s vision for the future of computer graphics in general. VideoCardz web-site reports that all the information about AMD Radeon R9 285 graphics cards and the “Tonga” graphics processors will be revealed on the 2nd of September, 2014. On the same date sales of the Radeon R9 285 products will begin.

Earlier it was reported, based on unofficial revelations, that AMD’s code-named Tonga silicon features 2048 stream processors, 128 texture units, 32 raster operating units and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory bus. In general, the graphics solution is expected to offer similar processing capabilities as the fully-fledged Tahiti XT (Radeon R9 280X, Radeon HD 7970), but lower memory bandwidth. The Tonga GPU is expected to be based on a new iteration of the GCN [graphics core next] architecture with some new features and capabilities.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While it will be interesting to see what Tonga GPU is all about, it will be even more interesting to see where computer graphics and graphics processing architectures are heading in general. Tune in to AMD’s webcast on Saturday to find out!

Become a Patron!