Hmm, yes, I forgot it's not possible to have less than 1GB with GDDR5 and a bus of at least 256 bits. So that means Cayman is 256-bit.What? Chiphell showed a 256-Bit sample card (8 memory chips) and these very authentic slides say 1GiB and 6Gbps.
Or do you believe AMD is going with Cayman over 300GB/s (512-Bit) BW?
If I'm not mistaken, non-square die should also increase the amount of i/o pads possible for the same area (not saying that's the reason here, just another reason why you'd want a non-square die sometimes). FWIW Juniper also wasn't square.
So I guess this means still limited to 2 non-DP monitors, what's new here is just DP 1.2 (which can daisy chain monitors - hence you don't need special Eyefinity card for 6 displays if your displays can handle that too).
Nice
To me the wattage doesn't add up. The 6870 seems to have the same consumption as a 5850, with not so much more performance. Ok, they saved up on die space. But the same (or similar) amount of heat, having to be dissipated from a lower area, wouldn't that create more problems?
But that's a rip-off! The same store has GTX460 1GB for 199E. While 6850 might be able to defend itself at this price point, the 6870 pricing is a farce to me!
The slides only give the maximum board power based on number of plugs. It doesn't say too much about the actual consumption. Let's look at it as upper boundaries.
How often have you seen reasonably priced pre-order offers for GPUs?
It is indeed more difficult to cool a smaller die vs. a larger one if it uses the same amount of power, but I'm not sure this really makes enough difference here. You could, for instance, still use the same hsf the fan would just have to spin faster (of course, that's not ideal for noise). Or the chip could be specified to run at a bit higher temperature (though that would cause in itself higher power draw too - might already be factored in in that TDP).
Why? If the HD6850 has same performance as GTX460 1GB it is slightly cheaper then. The HD6870 is expected to be faster than HD5850, and this shop at least only has one HD5850 which manages to beat that preorder price (barely) all the rest are more expensive (sometimes quite a bit). Of course, pricing could always be better, but if the rumored performance holds up this looks competitive to me.
I think the odds of tesselation performance being better than what GF104 offers are pretty slim. The other question though is why would you want that, just so that it's faster on unigine extreme?
Hmm yes I think that would be nice to have. Dunno though AMD just isn't focused that much on gpgpu as nvidia.
If Barts is really 2 RPE and Cayman 3 RPE (whatever those actually are...), pretty much no matter how I look at it Cayman would be barely 50% larger than Barts. Now, if Barts is indeed 230mm² that would put Cayman at - nearly exactly the same die size as Cypress...
