AMD: Volcanic Islands R1100/1200 (8***/9*** series) Speculation/ Rumour Thread

Grall said:
P2P or not, there's a possibility of flooding when you consider that all your data being transferred has to pass through the interface to the destination video card (the one with the monitor cable attached to it). That's the weak link in the chain, to say nothing of any possible limitations in internal bandwidth of the central hub.
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Not anything close to a weak link compared to the existing solution which is at best a 1 GB/s connection via a bridge link.

What measurements; what number of video card running crossfire, what screen resolution? What screen refresh rate? Go 120Hz (which many hardcore gamers are very eager to do), you again double bandwidth requirements over what is the current defacto standard. The bandwidth ceiling's gonna be flying towards your head at that rate.
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BeHardware among others have done extensive performance testing of the impact of PCI-e bandwidth. They last year tested a variety of PCI-e configurations with and without CF with a wide variety of workloads.

As far as max rez at 4k, theirs a nice limiter for that, its the cards themselves.

Also consider that of intel's current CPUs, only sandy and ivy bridge EX offer full PCIe 16x interfaces when running more than one board. Few people buy such systems to game on, due to rather massive costs. That halves available bandwidth for crossfire, IE problem for 4k rez/60Hz at least.
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you'll only run into a problem if you are running multiple 4k rez monitors in eyefinity. And if you are doing that...


Really? That'd be extremely surprising. There's a lot of pins in those connectors, particularly on AMD cards, enough for at least 4 differential signalling links I should think.
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You might want to go look at a 1x PCI-e interface sometime.
 
CaptainGinger said:
If PCIe is so good for this why were SLI and Crossfire connectors needed at all? Or has the situation only been viable since PCIe 3.0?
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In the bygone days that SLI and CF were introduced the support and reliability for peer-to-peer communications over PCI-e was haphazard at best. In the rare case that it actually worked reliably, the bandwidth was likely to be far from optimal esp in consumer chipsets.
 
fellix said:
Moar L2 cache! :p
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Well if they upped the L2 cache from 128kB to 256kB per 64bit MC (which would seem like quite a reasonable thing to do, after all Cape Verde already has that much too though it doesn't really seem to help much there), so in total going from 768kB to 2MB, that would only add around 100 million transistors or so (more if they are using spiffy things like 8t srams). Even 4 MB in total would only add another 150 million transistors on top of that, so still not that much. And 4 MB not even talking about 8MB already sort of seems unlikely to me, unless ROPs are now also using L2 cache (though ROP caches were tiny before).
 
Grall said:
Most (IE, all but two) of those pins are power and ground. Why would you have a lot of power and ground pins in a crossfire bridge...:?:
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There's quite a bit more pins than just power and ground, for hotplug etc. too. The actual transmission at the very least needs one differential pair for sending, one for receiving, plus you've got a differential reference clock too. Also, the ground pins aren't just there for power, they act as shielding, so multiple pairs (if that's more than pcie x1) are always separated by ground signals.
 
redstrat said:
http://lab501.ro/editoriale/interviu-devon-nekechuk-senior-product-manager-amd
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Google translated question about the cards(not 290 series) being reused 7000 series:
lab501: Ok, now to go into detail succulents for our readers. R290X and R290 cores are completely new. Wrong but assuming that other products (R280X, r270X, R260X, etc) are uses for old GPUs (7970GHz, 7950, etc)?


Devon Nekechuk: No. Part of GPUs we use have been used in other products before but I added some new features, both at the hardware and software (to think Mantle for example). On the other hand, if we look more closely at R260X, is the chipset used on the 7790. However, we are dealing with a redesigned PCB with higher operating speed, amount of memory, all bringing extra performance, while the price is designed specifically to get a quality / price ratio as good. Yes, the chipset itself has been used, but the overall product brings both a performance and a price / performance ratio improved.
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:rolleyes:
 
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But the 260x is the only other chip to feature TrueAudio isn't it? So does that mean they've added it for the re-launch or that it's already there and just not activated? Hopefully they'll up the bandwidth a good bit. The 7790 is horribly bandwidth limited.
 
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