[ECH]

Looks like dx11.1 will be a win8 only feature. I would be surprised to see any games using it.
article

I was looking to see it in use with a 7970 with win7 just to compare to win8.

[UniversalTruth]

As a gamer, will you be updating to Windows 8 anytime soon?

No, and you should get rid of this idea to desperately foist this ridiculous os.

Oh, and if you don't fix your os and with next versions continue in the same manner, then I will switch to Linux or MacOS or whatever... Just not this.

[Gipsel]

Originally Posted by Psycho

AMD already showed a dual-tahiti card card long ago, in a firepro presentation, and the 7990 never surfaced, so go figure... http://techreport.com/news/23114/amd...-dual-gpu-card

There may be no reference model from AMD, but you can actually buy different models from Powercolor (2 variants, the "normal" one and the Devil13) and Club3D with VTX having announced a fourth one (but it hasn't arrived in shops so far). Right now, you have to pay between 816€ for the cheapest version and 920€ or so for the Devil13 (including 19% VAT) here in Germany. And there are cards in stock, they are existing and buyable.

[gongo]

It always bugged me why AMD did not do a 7990..and let Nvidia run scot free on the high end....these cards are very easy money i would think from the high mark up....

However i remember catching a glimpse of "a" reference 7990 from AMD's own hands....and it has with 3 fans....maybe that has something to do about the missing dual Tahiti...when the 6990 came with a single fan stuck in the center...and Nvidia rushed out the 690.

I think AMD goofed up a bit on the TDP of Tahiti...i hope they dont drop compute resources in the Sea Islands....assuming it was the cause of AMD losing the perf/w/mm to Nvidia.

[jimbo75]

A 7990 would have been hammered on perf/watt vs the 690.

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

No, and you should get rid of this idea to desperately foist this ridiculous os.

Oh, and if you don't fix your os and with next versions continue in the same manner, then I will switch to Linux or MacOS or whatever... Just not this.

I'm a gamer, I updated to Win8, and after just couple days I can already say that Win8 is having the same problem Vista had - a lot of bad talk based on hearsay and 3rd or 4th hand information.

The OS is definitely not bad, the Metro/Modern-UI does take something to get used to, but there's a way to bypass it if you don't want to learn it.

[silent_guy]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

I'm a gamer, I updated to Win8, and after just couple days I can already say that Win8 is having the same problem Vista had - a lot of bad talk based on hearsay and 3rd or 4th hand information.

Well, that's discouraging. Vista is what kicked me into the Mac camp. My PC still hasn't been upgraded to Win7 and I still hate Vista first hand.

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by silent_guy

Well, that's discouraging. Vista is what kicked me into the Mac camp. My PC still hasn't been upgraded to Win7 and I still hate Vista first hand.

Aside from 3rd party driver issues, what was wrong with Vista when you tried it? Sure it wasn't on the level it's today, but as long as 3rd parties did their job, I don't know what would have been actually bad in it - sure, UAC could be annoying but could be disabled easily.
Don't blame the OS if 3rd parties screw up.

I used Vista since beta stages as the only OS, same with 7. With 8 I only did quick tries on the beta/rc stages, but moved to it this week as I finally got a SSD.

[jimbo75]

The biggest issue I had with Vista was that the hard drive seemed to be accessing constantly, even when the PC was supposed to be idling.

[OpenGL guy]

Originally Posted by jimbo75

The biggest issue I had with Vista was that the hard drive seemed to be accessing constantly, even when the PC was supposed to be idling.

Turn off auto-indexing. My biggest problem with Vista was that graphics performance was generally lower than XP. Win7 addressed most of these issues.

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by OpenGL guy

Turn off auto-indexing. My biggest problem with Vista was that graphics performance was generally lower than XP. Win7 addressed most of these issues.

But was that down to OS, or just immature drivers on the new driver model?

[OpenGL guy]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

But was that down to OS, or just immature drivers on the new driver model?

Both.

[Gipsel]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

Aside from 3rd party driver issues, what was wrong with Vista when you tried it?

Very bad performance for simple file system tasks, especially if they involved network accesses (it was often only 10% of the performance with XP). One could even crash the Windows Explorer with certain file copy tasks. The performance got somewhat improved with SP1, though (and the crashes were gone). But it was still tangible slower for accessing Windows network drives than XP at that time.

[silent_guy]

Originally Posted by jimbo75

The biggest issue I had with Vista was that the hard drive seemed to be accessing constantly, even when the PC was supposed to be idling.

This. The disk swapping. Never. Stopped. I don't care what the reason was. Add to that the inane security naggings. The unusable backup system (for the cheapest Vista version at least). I'm sure it was possible to fix all that, but I simply decided it was time to give up and spend a bit more for something less insulting that works out of the box. (The introduction of TimeMachine was the final push.) I did install a $20 (corporate discount) WinXP virtual machine on my Mac which was more bearable than Vista.

[no-X]

Originally Posted by iMacmatician

From ComputerWorld: "Nvidia, AMD release graphics processors for supercomputing."

FirePro SM10000: 1.48 DP TFLOPS, 6 GB memory.

The article on ComputerWorld was removed. AMD released the FirePro S10000 (not SM10000) today and it's really a dual-GPU board, which was showed by Mark Papermaster this summer.



http://www.amd.com/us/products/works...es/S10000.aspx

http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases...2012nov12.aspx

[Gipsel]

Originally Posted by no-X

The article on ComputerWorld was removed. AMD released the FirePro S10000 (not SM10000) today and it's really a dual-GPU board, which was showed by Mark Papermaster this summer.

http://www.amd.com/PublishingImages/...10000_375W.png

http://www.amd.com/us/products/works...es/S10000.aspx

http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases...2012nov12.aspx

Strange thing is, according to SemiAccurate it uses two Tahiti LE salvage chips (28 CUs) at 825 MHz, while one could get the same FLOP/s rating also with two full Tahitis at only 725 MHz, the latter version probably consuming quite a bit less power (especially when binned for a reduced voltage). I never thought the rasterizer and ROP performance would be that important in that market.


By the way, AMD's data sheet for the S10000 contains an error for the stated performance/Watt. While the claimed 3.94 GFlops/W for DP matches the 375W TDP and the 1.48 TFLOP/s, the 5.77 GFlops/W in SP should probably read 15.77 GFlops/W.

[OpenGL guy]

Originally Posted by Gipsel

Strange thing is, according to SemiAccurate it uses two Tahiti LE salvage chips (28 CUs) at 825 MHz, while one could get the same FLOP/s rating also with two full Tahitis at only 725 MHz, the latter version probably consuming quite a bit less power (especially when binned for a reduced voltage). I never thought the rasterizer and ROP performance would be that important in that market.

Triangle rate is higher with the higher clock speed.

[Gipsel]

Originally Posted by OpenGL guy

Triangle rate is higher with the higher clock speed.

Of course it is. But for pure numbercrunching it is quite irrelevant and two full Tahitis @ 725 MHz (with reduced voltage) would probably easily fit within a 300W TDP. At 300W it would have almost the same SP perf/Watt as the K10 (which is a duck at DP and has no ECC on internal SRAMs) and would also sit only slightly behind the DP perf/Watt of a K20 (while being in front in SP). It would just look more competitive with 725MHz and 300W instead of using cut down Tahitis running with 825MHz and 375W. This thing isn't named W10000, but S10000 (which should imply more focus on number crunching). But obviously AMD didn't do this distinction and just opted otherwise.

[A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y]

Originally Posted by gongo

It always bugged me why AMD did not do a 7990..and let Nvidia run scot free on the high end....these cards are very easy money i would think from the high mark up....

However i remember catching a glimpse of "a" reference 7990 from AMD's own hands....and it has with 3 fans....maybe that has something to do about the missing dual Tahiti...when the 6990 came with a single fan stuck in the center...and Nvidia rushed out the 690.

That card you saw is now called the S10000 and uses 375 Watts.

AMD did not produce a 7990 because 375 watts is not viable in a desktop machine.

Nvidia produced the 690 and stayed in the Power Envelope of a desktop. The 690 won rave reviews about it's design so I have no idea where your "rushed out" comes from.

AMD wasn't able to do a dual card and stay in the Power Envelope of a desktop so they didn't release it for the desktop but for the workstation market where they could get away with the very high power usage.

[Kaotik]

Originally Posted by A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y

That card you saw is now called the S10000 and uses 375 Watts.

AMD did not produce a 7990 because 375 watts is not viable in a desktop machine.

Nvidia produced the 690 and stayed in the Power Envelope of a desktop. The 690 won rave reviews about it's design so I have no idea where your "rushed out" comes from.

AMD wasn't able to do a dual card and stay in the Power Envelope of a desktop so they didn't release it for the desktop but for the workstation market where they could get away with the very high power usage.

You completely missed HD6990 and GTX590 which both went to that 375W? (or was it even over?)

[iMacmatician]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

You completely missed HD6990 and GTX590 which both went to that 375W? (or was it even over?)

IIRC the 6990 is 375 W and the 590 is 365 W.

I'm guessing NVIDIA wanted to go back to 300 W with the 690, for one reason or another.

[AlexV]

Originally Posted by Gipsel

Of course it is. But for pure numbercrunching it is quite irrelevant and two full Tahitis @ 725 MHz (with reduced voltage) would probably easily fit within a 300W TDP. At 300W it would have almost the same SP perf/Watt as the K10 (which is a duck at DP and has no ECC on internal SRAMs) and would also sit only slightly behind the DP perf/Watt of a K20 (while being in front in SP). It would just look more competitive with 725MHz and 300W instead of using cut down Tahitis running with 825MHz and 375W. This thing isn't named W10000, but S10000 (which should imply more focus on number crunching). But obviously AMD didn't do this distinction and just opted otherwise.

These are not Firestream (lulz, that's dead) cards though, and the markets they are intended for tend to care quite a bit about triangle processing rates (and other traditional CAD / modelling things) than they do about number-crunching. Even thoug AMD's messed up product stack makes this seem as a competitor to Tesla, it is actually a competitor to Quadro.

Also what AMD needs (actually would have needed before the train left a long time ago) to compete with Tesla is not more FLOPs, but rather a less dubious software proposition.

[Dave Baumann]

Originally Posted by AlexV

These are not Firestream (lulz, that's dead) cards though, and the markets they are intended for tend to care quite a bit about triangle processing rates (and other traditional CAD / modelling things) than they do about number-crunching. Even thoug AMD's messed up product stack makes this seem as a competitor to Tesla, it is actually a competitor to Quadro.

"S" pretty much stands for server, and these are targetted towards number crunching workloads not CAD workloads; Visualisation and sim are more maths problems. So these are more inline with prior "Firestream" offering than Quadro competitors.

Also what AMD needs (actually would have needed before the train left a long time ago) to compete with Tesla is not more FLOPs, but rather a less dubious software proposition.

Why? Software stack for professional solutions is very different from consumer.

[gongo]

Originally Posted by A1xLLcqAgt0qc2RyMz0y

That card you saw is now called the S10000 and uses 375 Watts.

AMD did not produce a 7990 because 375 watts is not viable in a desktop machine.

Nvidia produced the 690 and stayed in the Power Envelope of a desktop. The 690 won rave reviews about it's design so I have no idea where your "rushed out" comes from.

AMD wasn't able to do a dual card and stay in the Power Envelope of a desktop so they didn't release it for the desktop but for the workstation market where they could get away with the very high power usage.

Yap! That's the mythical card i saw...3 frick'in fans when their older 6990 had only one centrifugal spinner! This "7990" consists of 2 Tahiti Pro instead of the XTs....could it even fought on par with GTX 690? No wonder they canned it officially..

What caused AMD to missed their perf/mm/watt target they held on since 3870...? Tahiti isnt the largest die....leakage?

[Gipsel]

Originally Posted by Dave Baumann

"S" pretty much stands for server, and these are targetted towards number crunching workloads not CAD workloads; Visualisation and sim are more maths problems. So these are more inline with prior "Firestream" offering than Quadro competitors.

So why not using fully enabled Tahitis at a lower clock/voltage/power to maximize the FLOPs/W?
At 300W (appears reasonable to me for 725MHz and a slightly reduced voltage, nV squeezed two GK104@745MHz in 225W on the K10) and 32CUs it would aim squarely at both the K10 and K20 Teslas. I would imagine the ~14% lower rasterizer and ROP performance isn't that crucial for the number crunching tasks you mentioned. And it would look much better on a spec sheet comparing it to K10 and K20.