AMD is detailing the engineering accomplishments behind the performance and energy efficiency of the new Accelerated Processing Unit (APU), codenamed "Carrizo," and the new AMD Radeon R9 Fury family of GPUs, codenamed "Fiji," at the annual Hot Chips symposium starting today. The presentations focus on new details of the high-definition video and graphics processing engines on the 6th Generation AMD A-Series APU ("Carrizo"), and the eight year journey leading to die-stacking technology and all-new memory architecture included on the latest top-of-the-line AMD Radeon Fury Series GPUs ("Fiji") for 4K gaming and VR. Using a true System-on-Chip (SoC) design, 6th Generation AMD A-Series processors are designed to reduce the power consumed by the x86 cores alone by 40 percent, while providing gains in CPU, graphics, and multimedia performance versus the prior generation APU. According to AMD, the new AMD Radeon R9 Fury X GPU achieves up to 1.5x the performance-per-watt of the previous high-end GPU from AMD.

The path to the new "Fiji" family of AMD Radeon R9 Fury GPUs began with exploring the best die-stacking option for bringing large amounts of memory into the same chip package with the GPU while dramatically increasing the memory bandwidth available to a high-performance graphics engine, without increasing power consumption. Working with SK Hynix, the new GPUs based on AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture offer up to 4 GB of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) over a 4096-bit interface to achieve a 512 Gb/s memory bandwidth. The new memory is stacked close to the GPU in the package by implementing the first high-volume interposer as well as the first through-silicon vias (TSVs) and micro-bumps in the graphics industry. HBM and the interposer provide 60 percent more bandwidth than previous generation GDDR5 memory3 and 4x the performance-per-watt of GDDR5. At the same time, the "Fiji" family is capable of up to 8.6 TFLOPS performance, a nearly 35 percent increase over the previous generation (Radeon R9 290 Series GPUs).The result is an improvement of up to 1.5x performance-per-watt.