AMD: R9xx Speculation

Possibly, difficult to say until we've seen Cayman. An 896 SP card from Nv would be formidable to say the least (definitely in power consumption ).

 

From Gibbo at OCUK

 

He's trying to sell them, he's hardly going to say 'they suck, don't buy them so we are lumbered with stock we will have to clearance at below cost'. :/

 

If a crippled 570 is beating cayman, AMD is going to take a press beating selling their top end for $300.

 

I would say that SLI is worth 10-15% over Crossfire which is why it is not a done deal for Cayman. Nvidia dual chip cards tend to be better than their ATi ones, but I don't really follow the sector as much so my knowledge may be outdated.

 

This makes no sense to me. If you want to artificially increase the demand, you scream that your stock numbers are low, to create anxiety. You don't say that you have tons of cards, leaving enough time to wait for the reviews to decide.

 

It seems to me like crossfire 6850's have the beating of sli'd 460's. This appears to also be the consensus over most of the reviews.

Maybe you should tell us how you know "it isn't".

 

Good point. He does mention that there will be no gouging, which helps customer goodwill, unlike 5870 where we saw prices 20% above the recommended price.

 

Hi, my name is benchmark, and I want to disagree with you
(at least one or two of those odd "not scaling" issues has been fixed since the article AFAIK, like L4D2)

 

No empirical data backs up that 10-15%.

 

Caman is 195 watts. 2x Cayman will also have to have some parts disabled and also lower clocked to fit into the power and thermal limits of a single PCIe card. So yes I believe nVidia will have an answer for the 6990.

 

Do you believe the 6970 will be slower than the 570? We already have information that suggests the 6970 uses considerably less power than the 570.

I don't see how you can math this out as working unless you believe the 570 is actually significantly faster than the 6970. AMD is going to win on any multichip solution. Nvidia aren't competing that well on a per watt basis.

 

Don't know why you have them bookmarked in the first place

 

195W doesn't mean a dual card is 2x195W

In fact, I see a 5970 scenario for the 6990.. 2 x Cayman XT's @ Cayman Pro clocks

 

Shouldn't this be the other way around? I mean NV chips are about as big as they can be. And they're already having issues with yields. But because AMDs chips are smaller than have more room to increase the die size. With their better perf per watt/mm, I can't fathom how fast AMD can make a chip with the size of the 580.

 

You may get a chance to find out if 28nm is really not until 2012.

 

Flashbacks to RISC vs. CISC...ugh.

 

So does that mean it is 25% smaller than Gf110(err Gf100b sorry ) which if we assume GF100b to be 530mm2 is ~400mm2 for Cayman(Dont let Dave catch you say RV970 again)
OR
Does it mean GF100b is 25% larger than Cayman, in which case assuming the same 530mm2 for Gf100b, we get ~425mm2 for Cayman

As for the specs, right let me take a jab at it. How does this sound?

6970 = 1536 SP's, 880 mhz core, 5.5ghz mem

6950 = 1408 SP's, 800 mhz core, 5 ghz mem


Also with regard to the guy who went on and on about 28nm delays, can you please point to a source, otherwise stop talking nonsense. Edit: Meant credible source!

 

Yes, i acknowledged that if a < 400mm^2 < 200W card can perform ~GTX 580 levels, then that's quite impressive, esp. from an engineering standpoint

However, the bigger issue is that if these process nodes are being pushed back, ATI increasingly has to resort to Cypress/Cayman sized cards to compete, in which case its less sweet spot and more borderline monolithic - and there's issues with that. That is, not quite good enough to take the crown, but also not quite cheap enough to be sweet spot. So it'll be interesting to see where Cayman performs at

 

With all due respect, I don't think even Charlie considers nvidia to be that stupid.