AMD: R9xx Speculation

Bart is supposed to launch around mid-October

 

yes, but around mid October can still be more than three weeks away

 

According to Charlie, there's a press event on October 14, and availability around the 25th.

 

Whats the most realistic configuration if they go with the 4D SP-s.
A single SIMD could be 16*4 with 4 TMU-s.
And than combinations like 12*16*4 768 SP-s and 48 TMU-s, 16*16*4 1024 SP-s and 64 TMU-s , 20*16*4 1280 SP-s and 80 TMU-s.

 

- 768SP -- less than HD5770. Performance improvement solely to "un-shader"? What about "Cayman"? 1536 SP?
- 1024 SP -- holy grail!
- 1280SP -- how do they want to fit that in 40-nm and still have die-size smaller than Fermi?

 

I don't understand... Cypress has 1600 SPs and it's significantly smaller than Fermi. Why should be 1280SPs' part bigger?

 

I think I'll just hide under a rock for the next few weeks.

Wake me up when the first official announcements pop up.

 

Maybe I got confused, but that's how I remembered it. Or at least I remembered hearing twice about NI being taped out

IDK about the tape-out part about NI, but Juniper did finish before Cypress. And They were taped out fairly close to each other, probably within one week or two.

Juniper has almost twice the die count per wafer. Shouldn't it be much much easier to build up a stock?
Both Cypress and Juniper had supply problems anyway.

There's that, and there's the fact Cayman is late. Even if Barts have really bad margin (probably not much worse than Cypress though), it's still better than nothing.

If Fermi/GF100&GF104 is good enough to make it, I don't see why Barts can't. But then again maybe it's not replacing Juniper, not by itself anyway.

AMD should have made the plans separately, I don't see them making the same mistake all over again. Plus, Zecate is a really tiny chip, how much capacity can this little guy chew up anyway?
As for OEMs, AMD have done it many times before with their CPU production. And low end GPU still have good margins, not the best. But OEM market is simply too important to make a single mistake. They have to demonstrate their ability to deliver. Retail market, OTOH, not so much. Customers come and go, a few days of out-of-stock wouldn't hurt long term profitability.

 

Even the most optimistic rumor puts Barts right under Cypress. 1280SP, 4D or not generally won't beat 1600SP@850MHz, unless AMD is willing to clock it much higher. -- That's excluding tessellation of course.

Barts would be a mid-high range part, it should have lower TDP to make it easier to cost down which puts its TDP right around 150W.

Sure if you wish, you can make a better-than-5870 part. But it's simply not worth the hurdle when you have Cayman right around the corner and possibly cheaper to produce (and cooler) for that performance.

Anyway it's just my speculation, as is in the title of the whole thread. If you *know* different, please shed the light, I'm all ears on that.

 

nApoleon has indirectly confirmed it's real.

 

we're believing him because he's a known AMD/OEM/IHV employee?

 

The nice thing about Barts should be the OCing headroom.

 

Max res for HD 5700/5800 is 3x2560x1600? XFX begs to differ:

http://xfxforce.com/en-us/products/graphiccards/HD 5000series/5771.aspx

 

These rumors of 320x4 seem a bit odd. Anyways even more odd is the fact that the tdp is almost the same as the 5850... Seriously if this is supposed to be a mainstream part shouldn't it be around 100W, and yeah I can see that the 6750 is ~115, but that is fairly high for a consumer pc. So this makes me agree with mao5 that it is a fake.

 

That's because he can't confirm it's real

 

They were constrained by the 40nm.. but stills they bump a litllte perf/watt (30% increase in powerdraw vs 60%+ increase in specs). If the slide is real, i think price will go up a lot.
6750 will be priced a bit over 5770 and 6770 may be priced over 5830.

 

Not with a TDP of 146W, a default clock of 900Mhz and just one additional 6Pin power plug, though

 

If it's real... People used to buy 5700 series will just go for 6600 series. 5850 will go for 6750 and so on. Prize will be the same maybe lower, and performance more or less higher.

But... Is market still big enough (darn consoles just look at numbers of games sold for consoles vs. pc)? Do we need more performance than 5850 has? What exactly should make us buy 6000 series?

If it's just better performance, then... What if my 5750 1GB is all I need for current games?

 

Well, it s easy, just skip that generation. A lot of people still have 4xxx and older cards and are more likely the right target for the 6xxx series.

 

Well... he confirmed, that Barts isn't HD6800. He also confirmed, that Barts is HD6800. At this moment Barts is HD6700.

He also said, that Cayman has less SPs than Cypress, in another post he was speaking about 1920SPs... According to him the Vantage and Heaven screenshots are real (not to mention how much differed the GPU-Z part of the screenshot... one can hardly believe, that somebody outside of AMD had a working Cayman board with BIOS, final clocks + drivers more than 2 months before launch and leaked only a bunch of doubtfull screenshots and nothing more...)