AMD: R9xx Speculation

Here is a company which switched from the RV8xx->Evergreen naming just to throw off track all the curious onlookers. You reckon they'll let anything besides fud leak thru from a code name?

 

Makes sense overall, but doesn't it make Hecaton's life too small? If 28 nm is not fucked up, then NI could possibly come out less than a year into Hecaton's life.

 

What defines NI?

I'm suggesting that NI might be the same design as Evergreen+ (the first of which is Hecatoncheires, unless that is a family name , in which case that family), merely shrunk to 28nm. Maybe with a few tweaks. 28nm is a major node, i.e. high-risk.

It seems to me AMD is set to chip away at its GPUs now, instead of doing "big bangs" like R600 or Fermi. G80 was the last successful big bang.

The APU concept is meant to get an annual refresh. That's a timetable that isn't very accommodating of big bang risks, I suppose. Though BD with on-die GPU, whenever it comes, constitutes a big-bang of sorts - though not if you compare it with Llano.

Jawed

 

I think Hecatoncheires is not part of Northern Islands, but something distinct. i.e. H100 could be HD6000 and N.I. could be HD7000

 

On second thoughts, you are prolly right.

LRB1 does this by reducing a decade and half's worth of investment in GPU's to yet-another-ISA-extension. Fucking ugly. The closest to system level programmability so far has been Cell. It has PPE<->mailboxes to send messages, but (on surface atleast) it seems more suitable to non-evovling architectures like consoles. Dunno what can be it's equivalent in sending bits of data out to gpu kernels or vice versa.

 

I still believe that Hecatoncheires (seriously wtf is with the name, it should be simple and short like cypress or something this is why people like r600 , g80 and so on) is just a die shrunk cypress with mabye a few enhancments and mabye more shaders.

Sinceits on 28nm it should be up to 40% smaller than the cypress on 40nm. They can use it not as a pipe cleaning part but to move cypress and the rest of ati's 40nm dx 11 chips into lower price points while NI will come towards the end of the year and be the brand new gpu by ati .

Makes sense to me because the 28nm cypress will let them demand high prices on boards that cost alot less. If fermi isn't what its cracked up to be and the current ati line up is competetive then the 28nm cypress should slot into the same price or slightly lower while being much cheaper to produce.

NI then can take over for the 5970 and demand even larger prices because the performace should be greater than a 40nm fermi or else ati messed up.

 

At least Hecatoncheires is epic! And evil and chaotic. Plus, it has electric immunity, which should be nice for overvolting. It cannot attack with all hands simultaneously, though - which we've already come to know and love from Atis 5-way ALUs. It's also extraplanar, meaning: Not from this world i guess.
[L'INQ]

So sorry, but I couldn't resist.

On a more serious note: There were THREE of the hecathoncheires. Sweet-Spot-Executed, Salvage plus Dual-GPU?

 

Probably, I used a lot of "if" in my post

 

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100614

And for light relief:

Jawed

 

Man, 22 nm schedules are looking fucking shaky IMO. That they are even still seriously talking about maskless is scary (never going to fly on the same scale as present techniques unless they can scale to millions of simultaneous beams, which I don't think they can). It's EUV or nothing at the moment ... the multi-beam ebeam writers are nice, for making masks faster ... but nothing more.

 

A half node shrink (28nm->22nm) taking 2 years, that is if it all works out. Is this the beginning of the end of Moore's Law?

AFAIU, below 22nm, all bets are off. Is that correct?

 

Well Intel is going far below 22 nm even without EUV, but they are doing it with multipatterning ... an approach which TSMC isn't even hinting at.

 

22nm if a full node, 28 is the half of 32nm.

cheers

 

I thought 45, 32 & 22nm are full nodes & 40 + 28nm are half nodes?

 

I meant half node as in half of the 0.707 scaling (whether from 45->40 or 40->32)

TSMC has needed typically a year to do a half node shrink.

 

http://danielnenni.com/2010/02/28/tsmc-vs-globalfoundries-vs-ibm/

 

unless I missed something (and I may have) that article is mislabeled.. it's hardly a run down of TSMC v. GF v. IBM and more of a general summary of TSMCs proposed plans with a 1 sentence referring to IBM and GF in comparison at the end.

Almost looks like a marketing junket put out as saying "Hey we are still here.. over HERE.. HEY ME!" and EUV sounds promising it's actual performance remains to be seen.

Edit: not shooting the messenger (Jawed) by any means.. just my humble opinion.

 

NI wafershots??

 

IBM's foundry alliance--> GF,Samsung, Toshiba.

TSMC ( IMEC-TSMC Research Collaboration ) ---> Non IBM's foundry alliance

 

I wouldn't be surprised. I think ATI is going to abandon TSMC and go to GF for an aggressive move to the next process node. If they manage it, they will really pile the hurt onto Nvidia.