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

Scott at TechReport keeps going on about Tonga possibly having a 384bit memory interface. Is there any legitimacy to that theory? My gut says no, but my gut has been wrong before.

For what it's worth my gut says no as well, but I don't think its track record is any better than yours.


If it does have a 384-bit bus, then unless it has more than 32CUs too, I don't know what for.
 
Because all the R&D spent on a card would be better off not selling it.

/s

On R&D side, as Tonga "is" used in the 285 and W7100 and both are allready sold, they dont loose anything.

As for TongaXT cancelled, well i dont remember have seen AMD say they will release it, announces anything about it. It was just expected due to the fact one SM is disabled that a full one could come .

For be honest, im not even sure to get the point of release the 285 ONLY now.. 8months ago it will have fit perfectly the AMD lineup ( and remove the old GCN gpu from it ).. but today...
 
On R&D side, as Tonga "is" used in the 285 and W7100 and both are allready sold, they dont loose anything.

As for TongaXT cancelled, well i dont remember have seen AMD say they will release it, announces anything about it. It was just expected due to the fact one SM is disabled that a full one could come .

For be honest, im not even sure to get the point of release the 285 ONLY now.. 8months ago it will have fit perfectly the AMD lineup ( and remove the old GCN gpu from it ).. but today...
To make the chip, TongaXT will cost AMD the same to produce as TongaPro. Why would they possibly not come out with TongaXT to increase profit margins?
 
To make the chip, TongaXT will cost AMD the same to produce as TongaPro. Why would they possibly not come out with TongaXT to increase profit margins?

I dont say they will win more money, but that the R&D spent on developping Tonga ( as you was write ) is used on the Tonga"pro", W7100. Im not sure they loose much money, specially if they need decrease the price with upcoming opponent that could well be the 960 who should get similar performance of a GTX770.

Then, who know, they maybe just need reallocate more chips for the W7100 ( with a way higher price tag that you can find on gaming gpu ).
 
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What's this? The regional championship in jumping to unfounded conclusions.

AMD would never confirm (or deny) anything about unannounced/potential/imaginary future products on Twitter like that. They're just stating the obvious.
 
I dont say they will win more money, but that the R&D spent on developping Tonga ( as you was write ) is used on the Tonga"pro", W7100. Im not sure they loose much money, specially if they need decrease the price with upcoming opponent that could well be the 960 who should get similar performance of a GTX770.

Then, who know, they maybe just need reallocate more chips for the W7100 ( with a way higher price tag that you can find on gaming gpu ).
They can release a 7100X or w/e they want to call it and sell it for more. No product will be sold like this unless there is a good financial reason to. It does not matter what the competition is bringing.

I am not sure why you would possibly side with videocardz on this. They took a tweet out of context. It makes no sense to spend money on developing tonga with 32 CUs if they only wanted to sell it with 28 enabled.

My personal speculation is AMD needs to get rid of existing tahiti stocks before launching full tonga and they don't want people to be holding off too much. They launched the 285 because its currently cheaper to produce than the 280 and the old tahiti dies can all be sold off as 280x.
 
They can release a 7100X or w/e they want to call it and sell it for more. No product will be sold like this unless there is a good financial reason to. It does not matter what the competition is bringing.

I am not sure why you would possibly side with videocardz on this. They took a tweet out of context. It makes no sense to spend money on developing tonga with 32 CUs if they only wanted to sell it with 28 enabled.

My personal speculation is AMD needs to get rid of existing tahiti stocks before launching full tonga and they don't want people to be holding off too much. They launched the 285 because its currently cheaper to produce than the 280 and the old tahiti dies can all be sold off as 280x.

One more reason could be yields and currently, at tonga's price point, a full tonga with bad yield would do more damage to current AMD product than Nvidia.

It's curious that AMD didn't release a full product from the beginning. AMD has never released cut down first, then full product after, its been the opposite.

The only company that has done this is nvidia because they often make chip that have bad yields due to chip size.

There could be something wrong with the manufacturing of tonga that prevents yields from being high for the full chip.

What I mean it could do more damage than good is explained if Nvidia released the gtx 580 and gtx 480 at the at the time. But now the gtx 580 is now the 480 and the gtx 480 is the 470.

Its no secret that full fermi's were difficult to manufacture. Nvidia likely had some full gf100 chips but had many many more slightly defected chips that were good enough to be gtx 480s.

If Nvidia released both chips at the same time, you would have the ever plentiful gtx 470(with 480 shaders) and a handful of gtx 480s(with 512 shaders). What would happen is you couldn't charge nearly as much for 480 shader gtx 470 because it isn't the top dog anymore. You could still charge a premium on the 512 shader gtx 480, but since you only have a handfull ready at any time, you make less profit in the end.

So instead, you kill the launch of the full 512 shader gtx 480 for now, slide down the 480 shader version to the gtx 480 and use an even more cut down version for the gtx 470.

I think this is the most likely explanation, particularly since the 285x would't add that much performance and would only serve to depress the price of the 285.

Particularly with the launch of maxwell incoming, a full tonga is going to do nothing in reviews and is simply going to reitterate that maxwell is the better chip.
 
They could also be waiting to launch a faster chip to clear out stock or to have something to announce after new NVidia cards are out.
 
It absolutely isn't...

I should maybe have start by that, because it is effectively obvious that AMD will never communicate about a future launch / not released / not annunced etc product by a simple tweet ( who was just a response to another tweet )
 
It's curious that AMD didn't release a full product from the beginning. AMD has never released cut down first, then full product after, its been the opposite.

To go back quite a few years now, the X800 Pro with 4 of its 16 pixel pipes disabled was available 3 weeks before the fully enabled X800 XT (although details and benchmarks of both were released with X800 Pro availability).
 
It could be Mantle's official "final" release, too, accompanied by Mantle for professional markets (FirePro-reference)
 
Last time AMD did a twitter marketing campaign they just tied some of their CPU to a stupid baloon...
That was a rehearsal for their crash-the-party campaign. I just tried to find how many of the AMD army posted pictures of themselves with the game24 hashtag at the event. Couldn't find a single one. They then tried to stir things up by posting a number of other #game24 tweets, but there were no takers. Truly pathetic. You could say that the whole thing went down like a lead balloon.
 
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