AMD: Southern Islands (7*** series) Speculation/ Rumour Thread

[Dooby]

I think what most people are getting confused at is the numbering system for any new cards. AMD have left themselves with nowhere to go, given their history. They've never gone up in less than 10's (ie, no 7971's) and they've never (AFAIR) gone to "even 10s" (ie 20, 40, 60). We already have a 7970, and a 7990, and we're not expecting a 7980, or a 7975, so: where else does a new (more powerful) card sit?

At present the answer is "no where", and I think this is the place most people expect a higher tier card to appear from.

 

[AlphaWolf]

They have already upgraded the 7970 once without a new number. 7970 XTXUltraGEPlatinum Reviewer Edition coming soon.

 

[eastmen]

its over a year since the 7x00 series launched , why would anyone buy a card from that series at this point ? If amd doesn't want to have new gpu's out there for customers to buy I'm sure Nvidia would love to sell them something new.

I'm tired of all the games these companys play.

 

[3dilettante]

I sort of wish I was a fly on the wall or a party to the whole event, since it seems like some of the web sites only focused on certain parts of it.

There are several things I've gathered from the various web sites that I think might go a ways in explaining some of Scott's position.

The latest marketing line new emphasis on the number in the Radeon 7000 series, as the 7000 series itself has apparently become a brand presence in and of itself.
This sort of decouples the numerical element from the historical refresh cadence, and the latest round rebranding has decoupled numbers from silicon even as it has further decoupled the desktop and mobile numeral schemes.

In addition, Sea Islands has been revealed to be the shell under which the Solar family is housed under, and is not differentiated on an architectural level from Southern Islands as was indicated in FAD2012. This has decoupled code names from the update cadence, although this is not quite as strong as the link between the numeric labels and upgrades in the desktop market.

The next uncertainty, though one all sites seem to share, is whether Sea Islands has the potential of nudging the high water mark of Tahiti's performance a little higher. The apparent answer is that the the 7900 series will be the focus, depending on the context of how you interpret a number whose Brand Power has just broken it from the mortal assumptions of linear progression or architecture.
The apparently assumed answer on most sites is some variant of "probably no, maybe, I think".

Scott tried to tease out some kind of distinction between "product", "brand", and physical implementation, although for various reasons the last point was ducked in favor of "excitement".

There's this amorphous thing that once was imperfectly tied up in a convergence of numeric designations, code names, and implementation.

Numbers have been decoupled.
Code names have been decoupled.
Implementations are not disclosed, and are decoupled.
The assumed fate of the enthusiast products until late in the year is such that, for Scott's apparent high-end focus, AMD and progress have been decoupled.


One thing I did note is that the level of confusion in each web site is inversely proportional to how deeply the writer internalized the FAD2012 slide and tried to make it fit with AMD's current version of how things have always been.
I may share the same mental block Scott has, since I too find that holding the two AMD statements in my brain simultaneously causes a bit of uncomfortable dissonance.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

its over a year since the 7x00 series launched , why would anyone buy a card from that series at this point ?

Well 7970 launched at $549, today it's $399 with three new hot games and with enough power to still last for a long time, it's more like why would you buy these at launch? 7950 looks even better in that regard.

 

[LordEC911]

Scott tried to tease out some kind of distinction between "product", "brand", and physical implementation, although for various reasons the last point was ducked in favor of "excitement".

There's this amorphous thing that once was imperfectly tied up in a convergence of numeric designations, code names, and implementation.

Numbers have been decoupled.
Code names have been decoupled.
Implementations are not disclosed, and are decoupled.
The assumed fate of the enthusiast products until late in the year is such that, for Scott's apparent high-end focus, AMD and progress have been decoupled.

That is more or less where I ended up, though nowhere near as eloquent.

 

[psolord]

its over a year since the 7x00 series launched , why would anyone buy a card from that series at this point ? If amd doesn't want to have new gpu's out there for customers to buy I'm sure Nvidia would love to sell them something new.

I'm tired of all the games these companys play.

Buying two 7950s in my country, costs 600 euros. That's for the WF3s from Gigabyte.

If you deduct the value of the six games that come with them, each card ends up costing 250 euros. That's great value for people that don't own neither of the bundled games, like myself.

I understand that I am a minority here, but think of the single 7900 bundle. They offer two unreleased games, easily costing 25 euros each, even if you get their keys from online cd key stores, thus bringing the value of the single 7950 again to 250 euros.

On second thought, the value of the six games for the CFX bundle should be higher than 100 euros, if purchased separately.

 

[Alexko]

Frankly I don't know why Scott is taking such a stance - simple fact is that the roadmap continues unabated, unimpacted. As discussed the focus of Sea Islands is for notebook products first and was stated as such when we started talked about them at CES (though not everyone would have attended the breifings). We are still taping out and bringing up the same number of products irrespective of where they are focused or who (OEM notebook, OEM desktop, channel) is seeing them first. Obviously we're not going to give the farm away on the roadmap and product plans right now though.

Still, others seem to pick things up clearly:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6751/amd-reiterates-2013-gpu-plans-sea-islands-beyond
http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/AMD-wants-set-record-straight-its-future-GPU-strategy
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news...y-new-cards-same-architecture-some-surprises/

Surely you understand why this is so confusing. The traditional way of doing things is to change the series number when introducing new chips, or sometimes even when the chips are the same, just to please OEMs.

Now it appears AMD is doing the latter, while also introducing new chips without the series number going up. So unless I missed something, there will be "old" silicon sold as HD 8000 cards (e.g. HD 8970 OEM) and new silicon sold as HD 7000. This is pretty damn strange.

 

[Kaotik]

The new silicons are pretty much just filling the gaps in HD7-series left due the fact there was just 3 chips at first.

 

[Alexko]

The new silicons are pretty much just filling the gaps in HD7-series left due the fact there was just 3 chips at first.

That's not the impression I got from what Dave said, but we'll see.

 

[jimbo75]

It's a shift in emphasis from desktop to mobile. It's actually quite clever from a marketing standpoint as well. The point appears to be to have the mobile chips as 8-series first (and presumably 9-series etc etc) and this will help shift more units in the laptop space. If a non-enthusiast looks at a benchmark or two and sees the 7-series competing well with Nvidia's cards, they'll assume the 8-series is even better.

So we'll get 8-series desktop at the end of the year. Naming it as 9-series would just make the mobile chips look old again which is what they are trying to avoid. This is how it will be from now on, mobile first followed by desktop at a later point.

 

[iMacmatician]

I think what most people are getting confused at is the numbering system for any new cards. AMD have left themselves with nowhere to go, given their history. They've never gone up in less than 10's (ie, no 7971's) and they've never (AFAIR) gone to "even 10s" (ie 20, 40, 60). We already have a 7970, and a 7990, and we're not expecting a 7980, or a 7975, so: where else does a new (more powerful) card sit?

The 4860 was the only even number desktop card I know of (besides some OEM 8000-series parts), so I'd say a 7980 (and other such numbers) isn't completely out of the picture.

 

[pjbliverpool]

The bit that still doesn't tally up for me is the description of Sea Islands in the FAD2012 slide. It specifically describes it as a "New GPU architecture with HSA features". And then clarifies that description by stating "Major GPU architecture enhancements for graphics, compute, HSA".

How does that tally up with the idea that Sea Islands is actually just a different configuration of the existing GCN technology that we see in the current 7xxx series, renamed to 8xxx for OEM's?

What specifically are these Major enhancements? It just doesn't add up. That slide seems to describe in Sea Islands what we are now being told to expect at the end of this year from the "New series of products" as described on the call (according to Scott).

 

[eastmen]

Well 7970 launched at $549, today it's $399 with three new hot games and with enough power to still last for a long time, it's more like why would you buy these at launch? 7950 looks even better in that regard.

Buying two 7950s in my country, costs 600 euros. That's for the WF3s from Gigabyte.

If you deduct the value of the six games that come with them, each card ends up costing 250 euros. That's great value for people that don't own neither of the bundled games, like myself.

I understand that I am a minority here, but think of the single 7900 bundle. They offer two unreleased games, easily costing 25 euros each, even if you get their keys from online cd key stores, thus bringing the value of the single 7950 again to 250 euros.

On second thought, the value of the six games for the CFX bundle should be higher than 100 euros, if purchased separately.

It only works if your interested in the games. The only one i'm interested in is bioshock. The 7950s don't offer enough of a jump over my 6950@ 6970 speeds to justify buying it . There are many other things I can spend my money on , like a rift or one of NVidia's new cards that offer more performance or one of the new consoles coming out.

 

[AlphaWolf]

It only works if your interested in the games. The only one i'm interested in is bioshock. The 7950s don't offer enough of a jump over my 6950@ 6970 speeds to justify buying it . There are many other things I can spend my money on , like a rift or one of NVidia's new cards that offer more performance or one of the new consoles coming out.

Which Nvidia card offers more performance for the same price? You'll actually spend more for less performance going nvidia right now. And you might be able to sell the keys if you're willing to try.

 

[silent_guy]

its over a year since the 7x00 series launched , why would anyone buy a card from that series at this point ?

Because it's still a very fast GPU?

I'm tired of all the games these companys play.

They're in the game of doing business. It's not an easy one to play and they're one of the two last standing. They must be doing something right.

I'm sure they didn't want go back on their initial projections (GCN2 etc) but you have to do with the constraints you have.

Their communication about it was a disaster though...

 

[Tofu]

The bit that still doesn't tally up for me is the description of Sea Islands in the FAD2012 slide. It specifically describes it as a "New GPU architecture with HSA features". And then clarifies that description by stating "Major GPU architecture enhancements for graphics, compute, HSA".

How does that tally up with the idea that Sea Islands is actually just a different configuration of the existing GCN technology that we see in the current 7xxx series, renamed to 8xxx for OEM's?

What specifically are these Major enhancements? It just doesn't add up. That slide seems to describe in Sea Islands what we are now being told to expect at the end of this year from the "New series of products" as described on the call (according to Scott).

+1

Anandtech says: "At the same time AMD also made clear that Sea Islands is based on the same architecture as Southern Islands – the first generation of Graphics Core Next (GCN1) – and that these parts are essentially just new configurations that we didn’t see with Southern Islands. This is why Oland is architecturally and feature-wise indistinguishable from previous GCN parts, and why it fits in to AMD’s product stack where it does."

http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/AMD_Sea_Islands_Instruction_Set_Architecture.pdf
If you look into AMDs official Sea Island document you find the following on page 13: "Differences Between Southern Islands and Sea Islands Devices", which includes seven bullet points followed by new instructions.

I don't know if this qualifies for "Major GPU architecture enhancements..." but it shows that Oland/Mars (if it really belongs to Sea Islands/Solar Systems) has some enhancements over the current 7000 series desktop chips.

So, will AMD release 7800 and 7900 cards basing on this enhanced architecture?

I am confused.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

So, far all I get out of this is to expect something along the lines of...

9700 pro -> 9800 pro.
X1800 -> X1900
4870 -> 4890

Basically the old naming scheme where minor updates stayed in the same naming family rather than the more recent trend for those minor updates to receive a new generational badge. Although I guess to be fair, the past few generations 5xxx, 6xxx, 7xxx have had fairly significant changes, at least at the top of the product stack.

So perhaps instead of having something relatively radical for each product update, they're just going back to the old way of doing things. Major product update -> Minor product refresh. Then repeat for another generation. Just with longer intervals between update and refresh.

But at this point, who knows? Guess we'll find out eventually.

Regards,
SB

 

[jimbo75]

I really doubt we'll see anything faster than the 7970 GHz edition until the real 8000 series. An upgrade on Pitcairn and Cape Verde perhaps, but I wouldn't wait on those either.

 

[3dilettante]

http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2013/02/AMD_Sea_Islands_Instruction_Set_Architecture.pdf
If you look into AMDs official Sea Island document you find the following on page 13: "Differences Between Southern Islands and Sea Islands Devices", which includes seven bullet points followed by new instructions.

There are some new instructions, expanded queuing, and a new addressing mode. Several instructions got dumped, as well.
What's not so new is the Northern Islands graphic outlining the read-only texture memory pipeline. (fig 2.1)

A few of the reserved bits from the Southern Islands document are being used to indicate resources for the flat addressing mode.
This access is new, but it doesn't play as well with the existing LDS and memory operations, and because of its split personality, it doesn't complete in order. There's an indicated race condition that requires a wait count of 0, which sounds like this is not to be used too freely.