AMD to release its Radeon R9 390X early next year, 20nm with HBM tech

AMD is starting to ramp up its rumor machine, with talk of the new Radeon R9 390X, it's next generation flagship GPU. AMD's new R9 390X is expected to be available in the first half of 2015, according to DigiTimes.

The new Radeon R9 390X is based on AMD's Bermuda GPU core, which should kick some serious ass, bringing a slew of new things to AMD's silicon. First off, we should see the R9 390X being the first GPU to be built on TSMC's new 20nm manufacturing process, but the card is rumored to arrive with High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM. HBM is 3D stacked memory technology that will offer an incredible amount of bandwidth on the already-fast GDDR5 tech that is used, with around 100% more bandwidth, all while using less power.

AMD is also rumored to be using hybrid liquid cooling on the new reference R9 390X, similar to what the company used on its dual-GPU Radeon R9 295X2 earlier this year. The problem here is, without a next-gen GPU coming out until at least Q2 2015 or so, what will AMD do to fight off what is an incredible new set of GPUs from NVIDIA? Aggressive price cuts on its R9 290 series, that's what. The only thing AMD can do until its launches its new R9 300 series is drop the prices of what it has now, considerably, to fight off Maxwell from NVIDIA.