AMD: R9xx Speculation

You haven't seen the prices from Informatique?

And I have my reasons for the 1120 SP's.

 

Yeah it could be, I don;t know.

This is explained a lot already in this topic. CaymanXT will be volted higher as a single chip sku, it will use a lot of power: ~225w. They will bin the cayman xt chips, cherry pick lower power cores and hit them with a lower stock vid. It's the same process they did for Cypress & Hemlock. Two low power undervolted binned Cypress cores that are underclocked. When they have a 188w TDP on the 5870 boards with ~1.168v and can actually pull ~235w when doubled up at 1.056v on a Hemlock board, you can extrapolate that info and get ~225w & ~290w for Cayman & Antilles. And there is room up or down for Antilles as far as power consumption goes. Then they taunt the 6k chips as even more power efficient, the boards with CHil PWMs. Anyways that question will get asked and answered every few pages or so for the next 2-3 months. Then someone will come along saying, "you know what i believe antilles is 2xbarts based.." They have all kinds of technologies like ULPS, Powerplay, and clockgating. Hardware advancements like 2nd gen 40nm binning, decap rings, modified clock states, reworked board components, thicker pcbs, lower leakage designs, I would expect 6990 to have a 300w TDP and 260-295w usage in 3D gaming compared to 300w TDP and 225-240w load with the 5970. And it'll still be equal to or less power hungry than a 4870x2.
5970 pulls less than a 480, there is PLENTY of room for Antilles, even with just 6pin+8pin on the board. People doubted 2900xt, 3870x2 spartan, hemlock, etc...

 

I knew I had already read that number somewhere somewhen ... what a coincidence:

 

I've written that?

 

A bit more than a year ago in the R8xx speculation thread, yes

 

Can't find it in my history on B3D and I can't remember...

 

Iam curious what will hapen to 5850 and 5870 prices with 6850 running for around 190 € (a bit slower than 5850 but new features and maybe better dx11). They are still high.

 

My comment was in response to Rangers' comment that the launch/NDA expiry was on the 18th, with yesterday (the 14th) being the press day. That would mean only 4 days for reviewers to play with both cards. I haven't signed an NDA but I'm not going to ruin AMD's good will by admitting when it does expire, though I'll just say the answer has definitely been posted.

Edit: just saw the CC transcript in which Dirk Meyer mentions the launch next week. no sense playing dumb now

 

Actually, looking at some tesselation numbers again (apart from the unigine/stone giant scores where the performance difference between GTX460/HD5850 isn't actually THAT big) (http://www.hardware.fr/articles/795-5/dossier-nvidia-geforce-gtx-460.html) I think eclipsing GF104 numbers shouldn't be too hard. With tesselation, the GF104 seems just barely able to output more than 1 tri/clock. That would mean Barts could (thanks to the higher clock) actually exceed that even with 1 tri/clock limitation. Despite AMD claiming tesselation shouldn't be limited to 1/3 tri rate of non-tesselated case, all tests showed this limitation - so if AMD can change that (whatever was causing it - thread generation?) that would be enough to beat GF104. Actually, just a factor of 2 increase would probably be enough for Barts not to be slower in Unigine Extreme or Stone Giant. So maybe it'll still look a bit weak compared to GF104 on paper but turn out to be at least as fast in practice.

 

Barts won't be outputting even 1 tri/clk though even when tessellating. It's more like 4 triangles every 5 clocks.

 

the new x850 Press Edition?

 

more like Fermi 512 Edition

 

txssxxxxxx AVPLP2

 

Do we have to understand that?

 

Huh, Dell is offering $150 off all Alienware videocard upgrades (ATI and nVidia), are they moving inventory because they are in the know?

 

hmm... improved tesselation? Alies vs Predator and Lost Planet 2?

 

I have no idea, just wondering if it will be that?

 

Sometimes I can't follow you, and I'm almost sure that I'm not the only one.

 

Of course they are in the know. Why they do it though, is another question