Leaked slides and information about AMD's mini Fury card, the R9 Nano, point to an imminent launch. According to Thai website Zolkorn (via VideoCardz), the R9 Nano will launch on Thursday, August 27. AMD_UK tweeted last week that the launch was “just around the corner.” And now slides are out in the wild showing off the Nano's HBM configuration, with a very similar configuration to the larger Fury X.
Knowing that Nano is just around the corner ;) pic.twitter.com/zpKUBA1MY7
The tiny R9 Nano was shown off in June at the PC Gamer Show alongside the R9 Fury X and a dual-GPU version of the Fury, which AMD said would be coming at a later date. The Nano is rumored to have the same GPU configuration as the Fury X, albeit downclocked in order to meet a 175W power consumption requirement from its single 8 pin PCIe connector. So, the Nano won’t be quite as powerful as the Fury X out of the box, but for its size it still packs a punch. It’s likely set to be the most powerful 6-inch card available.
Videocardz reported on a leaked datasheet which describes the Nano’s engine clock as “up to 1,000 MHz”, which is much more than expected. It also has 4,096 streaming cores, which is impressive for its size and limited 175W power. The leak also confirms that the Nano features 4GB HBM1 memory across a 4,096-bit memory bus at 500MHz clock speed. It has the same number of TMUs (256) and ROPs (64) as the R9 Fury X, and its computing power is only slightly lower at 8.2 TFLOPS compared to the Fury X’s 8.6. That's a hell of a lot of power for such a tiny card.
AMD boasts 2x performance density and 2x performance per watt for the Nano over the Radeon R9 290X graphics card. The company’s new High Bandwidth Memory, the Fury’s big selling point, replaces the GDDR5 that the 290X uses. Cells are stacked vertically, so the effective bandwidth is faster and more power efficient. According to TechPowerUp, AMD recently released some numbers that showed the Nano also has a 50 percent performance per watt advantage over the R9 Fury X, which makes sense given its lower power draw. It’s a feisty little guy.
All that's left to pin down is price, which we'll find out once the R9 Nano is available.
