AMD: R8xx Speculation

I think this round we are left dry.

The exact term for this should be "micrograph", but die shot is just the common name for the IC snapped for a picture.

 

The new SAD instruction, does that work on vectors of 8 bit integers or is it floating point?

 

Someone already mentioned P22K for Hemlock?

 

It shouldn't reacht that, ever. It didn't here not even when the fan wasn't working properly, it downthrottled in the high 90s.

 

BGA -- start counting boys!

 

Tech Power Up has faux 5850 benchmarks along with the 5870. Which is interesting.

How do they disable two SIMD's?

5850 seems like the better buy for me. Beat 285 in most games tested and a reasonable price at 259. It's something I could actually see myself purchasing were I in the market today.

I tell you what though, 4890 is still a brutally fast card for the (low) price.

 

One of those laser pens perhaps?

 

Still no GTA IV benchmarks. Sigh.

 

[H] said they might do some, on their more detailed part 2 review, coming soon.

 

http://www.tomshw.it/guides/hardware/graphic/20090923/images/Grand Theft Auto No AA.png

 

I think on RV700 series there was a register you could write to that disabled or enabled smids, might be the same on RV870.

 

Here's one!

Why would you need those anyway? Even Hitler's secretary knows it's a crappy game anyway!

Now it's your turn to find me Crysis DX10 Very High/Enthusiast 1920X1200/1080 NoAA!

 

Here you go:
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=842&pageid=9

 

Someone should bench Crysis/Warhead with custom (Nebula's ) configs, 'cause the default spec, IMO is not very good quality/perfomance-wise.

 

Others have insisted that since Larrabee is a CPU and uses x86, it won't have bottlenecks...

It shouldn't be too hard to do, given how bad the bandwidth is between GPUs.

It would depend on how much that 10% expands in a multi-chip case, and what adequate scaling is.
An increase in the percentage for a dual-chip case would be a penalty taken out of the doubled peak versus a lower-overhead single-chip solution.
Without actual simulations, it would be little more than hand-waving on my part to guess how much that 10% could expand.

I was listing out areas of the current scheme that can potentially jump chip, and that have some unquantified cost that is currently assumed to be acceptable.
These are areas where either the cycle count can jump by an order of magnitude, or the bandwidths can drop by an order of magnitude.

At a hardware level, Larrabee is not as latency tolerant as a GPU.
At a software level, a long-enough strand appears able to cover texture latency in a single-chip case.
A texture read or remote fetch would be even longer than that, though what that costs I am not sure.
The fiber would have to be compiled to be longer, which may have some similar penalties to increasing GPU batch size.
I'm not sure what practical limits there are to fiber length.

I was thinking about the case of deferring something like tesselation to the back-end. Bins would already be farmed out to the other chip when newly generated triangles might cross tile boundaries and need to update other bins.

In the final result, that spread would happen anyway, so in retrospect I was abusing the term.
The bin spread percentage is the measure of the number of triangles that span bins and may not actually change, but the timing and cost of it might.

I know modern chips have a ton of monitors, though I'd be curious how much a core based on the P55 will sport.
Larrabee should run shader compilation on-chip, so maybe it can make adjustments.

The next question is when Larrabee is small enough and cool enough for such a setup.
The chip in the die shot certainly doesn't look like a promising candidate, but perhaps at a later node.
The two large ICs on a card scheme GPU makers have been using may be a fluke.
Even if Larrabee does sport better scaling, the market that would benefit from this is already very niche.

Yeah, that was pretty underwhelming.
Does this help much for tesselation?
The peak triangle throughput numbers don't change.

 

I find Anand review lacking in few places. Author conclusions sometimes are wired, like poor scaling of 5870CF in L4D where clearly cards are hitting same wall at lower resolutions which points to CPU bottleneck .

Time to read another review then ...

PS. Anyone knows who's selling new cards in UK? (except overclockers)

EDIT: I had a thought. Maybe the reason why we aren't seeing RV870 x-ray shots is because there is more in it that AMD is showing today? If Cypress is really 14 SIMD and 181mm2 then that would make some sense. Any opinions??

 

scan.co.uk had some I think, but against all odds OCUK was cheaper

 

Good luck finding one before next week, as Dell got virtually all of the initial production of 5870. If you haven't ordered one already, chances are you won't get another chance until next week.

Regards,
SB

 

Let's hope Dell's swallowing of the first run means more recently fabbed chips with better thermals will fill the channel with the full rollout.

Hemlock's future as a dual-chip board sort of depends on this, though hopefully not all cool chips go to that SKU.

 

No, they didn't. This is a pretty rediculous rumor.