AMD: R9xx Speculation

Remember the X1800 and X1900

 

1. We are comparing mobile parts to desktop parts now, are we?
I rest my case after this since I didn't know how ridiculous you are,
And while I'm at it, try explaining 5830m/5830, 5770m/5770, 5750m/5750
........there is a very long list.


2. Like I said many times, the purpose is to make marketing easier. You TELL
your customer something that's called marketing or am I wrong about that too?
GTX/GTS or iSomething is called sub-brands. It is needed and proven to be
successful. AMD don't use it on GPU and is doing it all wrong with CPU parts.
How dumb can one be if they can't understand a simple sentence such as
i5 is for mainstream market, be it Clarkfield Lynnfield or Sandy Bridge (GT2XX/GF10X).
Can you say the same for X770, X670, X870 for sure? Their target market segment
varies A LOT between generations. (The same applies to Athlon/Phenom or
X2~4). While X3 700 series isn't always better than X4 600 series, vice versa.
Same goes Athlon X4 and Phenom X2. See, FAILURE on ALL parts.


3. Performance/price may change with every single generation. 3870 is
vastly different from 4870 regarding price/performance, so is 5870 and
maybe 6870 as well if it's indeed Barts. There's no way to generalize it.
Since 2600/36X0 wouldn't be on the same plane as 5670/5770 or 4670.
It's not picked randomly, GTX parts are always >$170 mostly >$200 parts.
Would that be X670, X650, X730 , X750 or even X770 where you draw the line?

And do remember most folks don't want to know the details, so the vastly
different cache core turbo won't matter. They just get it from the sales
person i7 is expensive (and so on) and numbers means exactly the price and
performance. You can't make it so simple with what AMD is doing. A number
of questions will pop out such as why is X4 both 600 and 900? what's the
difference? Why is 700 worse than 600 or Phenom worse than Athlon at times?
And you can't answer them without mentioning core/cache/frequency etc.
With Intel/NV's approach, it's pure and simple: you DON'T have to konw the
features, in fact you'd be better off without them. You just need to know the
number is absolute performance, prefix means the price. And that's it. I think MOST
folks prefer living without head splitting details other than price performance and
maybe power draw.
Speaking of TDP, each series i7-900 etc has a single TDP (except S), how is that
different from AMD?


5. If those aren't enough, let me ask you something in the end:
Do you think Intel/NVIDIA or AMD is the smarter one with regard to marketing?
Sure, Intel and NVIDIA both have failures on the technology part. But never did
once have they screwed the marketing part. If they are both doing the same thing
while AMD is not, I can guarantee you AMD is doing it wrong, not otherwise.

 

Did you just notice that?

 

I'm not praising them for slashing prices, I don't even think that they are slashing prices, because I don't see Barts as a successor to any chip in AMD's previous lineup. It's a new card to fill a pre existing hole where AMD was the weakest. Cayman is the successor to Cypress XT and Barts with its 256 bit bus and die size is definitely not a successor to Juniper. 5830 is the closest thing you can call it's predecessor, but that was a bit of a mess. Barts is not mid or high range, it's inbetween. I quess they should have called it 6_7.5_70

edit: and for the record I have no manufacturer bias whatsoever. Try finding me saying something bad about nVidias cards... or any of the things (Physx, Batman AA etc.) other people have complained about.

 

I'm in a bit of a hurry right now so I won't go into much detail, especially since we're getting wildly off-topic, but I think there's been a misunderstanding: I never meant to say that iSomething isn't successful, just as I never said that, say, NVIDIA's renaming antics aren't successful. Why I meant is that for people who care about the specifications of the products they buy (which, admittedly, is probably not even 5% of the market) iSomething is confusing. Just as renaming the 8800 GT to 9800 GT was confusing. It probably sold a lot of cards, though, so in that sense it was successful.

 

Man, for a few dozen pages or so I thought we were in the console forum with all this strategic positioning talk. Can we step off this hamster wheel of righteousness until we get performance figures, please?

I'm asking for mercy, not as a mod, so feel free to ignore me. I don't want anyone to explode from bottled up nervous energy.

 

It would be a good move, I think.

Instead of "7" being half of "8", we could have "4" < "5" < "6" < "7" < "8" < "9", or 6 price ranges.

Say "4" is Cayman with ~HD5800 performance, "5" could be Barts with ~HD5900 performance, "6" could be Antilles (Cayman X2), "7" could be "Barts X2" and that even leaves room for 2 new SKUs, while keeping the "1/2/3" for the integrated stuff.

Like I said earlier, Barts has to be the biggest chip if it's called "8", plus it makes more sense to double a lower performance SKU if they're no more half of each other (1-2-3-6 has some "exponential look" which fits badly, think 1-2-3-4).

 

No. Look at the progression of x700's and x800's and you'll see that the anomoly is 5800.

 

Agreed. x800s were apparently place for "sweet spot"-like SKUs. 3800, 4800.

5800 is kind of big and kind of .. performing (thanks to the GTX480 )

 

Because you sold/sell it too expensive. I know 40nm is a big problem, but if you look on a long term market trend, a card with the characteristics like the HD 5870 should not stay such a long time over the $300.

 

The same applies when you look at the launch pricing characteristics or the die sizes.

 

AnarchX: It would happened, because it would be pushed by another 32nm cheaper-to-made product. But 32nm process was cancelled and 40nm process is still expensive. It was the most expensive TSMC's process at launch and its price even raised since the launch. Price of memory modules raised, too. It is no wonder, that the HD5800 isn't cheap.

 

So 6870 has a chance to perf worse than 5870 in DX9/DX10....??? I guess the higher clock speed makes up for the lesser SP....terrible specs...$280 or bust! Its a price drop masked by minor refining and inappropriate use of branding imo....misleading and cuts off the higher end possibilities...mind you it is the very internet dweebs who would go about upgrading high end gpus...so yeay....backlash matters...imo again...

 

Can you please, please ask again as a mod?

 

I was about to jump in claiming that I have it all figured out, but then I read your message and realized that claiming that Barts is not the Juniper successor but the Cypress successor and we have the names all wrong, was not well thought of.

What you said really struck me. Cypress was 1/2 Hemlock and Juniper was 1/2 Cypress. Redwood was 1/2 Juniper and the rest is history. Cedar was a creation of its own though.

Based on that RPE slide, barts will be 2/3 Cayman and Caicos will be 1/3 Cayman. There's a different segmentation now which actually explains things. If Caicos is a 160x4 SP part, maybe they will cut that in half to create a 80x4 SP part and even maybe one more cut for a 40x4 SP part, which would be the lowest of this generation.

So all in all there will be one extra part compared to the Evergreen series. I guess some extra segmentation really needed to take place and the 68XX was the "unlucky" one. Moreover, I still haven't ruled out the possibility of the Antilles XT being Cayman based and the Antilles Pro being Barts based.

So all in all, things could be looking like this

(480x4 SP 3 RPE part) ie Cayman x2 Antilles XT - Radeon 6990
(320x4 SP 2 RPE part) ie Barts x2 Antilles Pro - Radeon 6980
(480x4 SP3 RPE part) Cayman - Radeon 6970 + Radeon 6950
(320x4 SP 2 RPE part) Barts XT - Radeon 6870 + Radeon 6850
(160x4 SP 1 RPE part) Caicos - Radeon 6770 + Radeon 6750

(80x4 SP half RPE part) Dunno the name - Radeon 6570 + Radeon 6550
(40x4 SP half half RPE part) Dunno the name - Radeon 6470 + Radeon 6450

Now although all this is reasonable, it still has some flaws, in the respect that the 6770 will not be much faster than the 5770 and the 6870 will be no much faster than the 5870. Same goes for 6980 since it would be essentially equal and/or a bit slower, than the 5970.

All in all, we are now possibly looking at 7 parts (not count the 6850, 6750 etc) while there were 5 parts for Evergreen. Even if we take my suggested Antilles pro (2X Barts) out of the equation, or better yet both dual cards, we have five chips for the NI and four chips for the Evergreen. This alone should cause some extra segmentation and I believe that's what the whole fuss is about.

I tend to believe that this is the best AMD could do at the moment, keeping in mind the limitations of the same process.

Look at the bright side. We will probably get better DX11 and UVD3 and quite possibly, 5850 and 5870 performance levels, will meet a much needed price cut. If the above are correct and looking things from the manufacturer's perspective, they couldn't have done better. Actually they essentially prepared for the 7000 series as well!

 

You missed Turks. I think it is better than Caicos.

 

Yeah maybe I don't remember the names correctly. If the chip directly under Barts is Turks, then that's what I meant.

 

That's a fair point, starting with 38xx. But it hasn't been long enough to establish a trend. The 9800, x800 and x1800 before them were most definitely positioned higher than the 3870 was, the latter being more a consequence of poor performance than any strategic positioning. I don't think anybody has a problem with 6800's returning to the price points of old though, there's only an issue if it's slower than the 5800 series.

Come now, we wouldn't want B3D to get a reputation for suppressing dissent against AMD for the same things Nvidia was mutilated over. Fair and equal nerd rage please

 

What are you talking about?

 

Old? New? 5770 = 6770....now spin dat...