AMD Radeon Rx 200 series

The Rx 200 series is a family of GPUs developed by AMD. A "preview" was seen on September 25, 2013. These GPUs are manufactured on a 28 nm Gate-Last process through TSMC or Common Platform Alliance.

Release

The Rx 200 series was announced on September 25, 2013, at the AMD GPU14 Tech Day event.Non-disclosure agreements were lifted on October 15, except for the R9 290X, and pre-orders opened on October 3.

Architecture

This article is about all products under the AMD Radeon Rx 200 Series brand.

Radeon

Radeon /ˈreɪdiːɒn/ is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of Advanced Micro Devices. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Technologies, which was acquired by AMD in 2006.

Radeon Graphics

Radeon Graphics is the successor to the Rage line. Three different families of microarchitectures can be roughly distinguished, the fixed-pipeline family and the unified shader model-families of TeraScale and Graphics Core Next. ATI/AMD have developed different technologies, such as TruForm, HyperMemory, HyperZ, XGP, Eyefinity for multi-monitor setups, PowerPlay for power-saving, CrossFire (for multi-GPU) or Hybrid Graphics. A range of SIP blocks is also to be found on certain models in the Radeon products line: Unified Video Decoder, Video Coding Engine and TrueAudio.

The brand was previously only known as "ATI Radeon" until August 2010, when it was renamed to increase AMD's brand awareness on a global scale. Products up to and including the HD 5000 series are branded as ATI Radeon, while the HD 6000 series and beyond use the new AMD Radeon branding.

GeForce 900 series

The GeForce 900 Series is a family of graphics processing units developed by Nvidia, used in desktop and laptop PCs. It serves as the high-end introduction for the Maxwell architecture (GM-codenamed chips), named after the Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

The Maxwell microarchitecture, the successor to Kepler microarchitecture, will for the first time feature an integrated ARM CPU of its own. This will make Maxwell GPUs more independent from the main CPU according to Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. Nvidia expects three major things from the Maxwell architecture: improved graphics capabilities, simplified programming as well as better energy-efficiency compared to the GeForce 700 Series and GeForce 600 Series

Maxwell was announced in September 2010. The first GeForce consumer-class products based on the Maxwell architecture were released in early 2014. Nvidia is expected to release the Maxwell-powered Tesla accelerator cards as well as Quadro professional graphics cards based on this architecture in late 2014. Eventually, Maxwell architecture will be used for mobile application processors that belong to the Erista family of Tegra SoCs.