AMD: R9xx Speculation

Cypress holds a terrible and shocking secret...

 

Perhaps now that it is about to be replaced, AMD would be willing to release a die shot? Then again, I don't understand why they didn't do it in the first place. It's not as if NVIDIA hadn't jumped on the first opportunity to get an HD 5870 and thoroughly dissect it anyway…

 

What's there to learn in a die shot (for the competition that is) Maybe I'm being dense and simplistic, but it seems like tech pr0n for the rest of us forum folk.

 

In fact , I would expect them to have a fully fledged morgue for ATi chips , including separate organs and limps (shaders and other logics ) , maybe even an anatomy textbook.

 

Stop it please!

I'm getting mental images of nV engineers getting caught red handed licking Cypress dies.

 

20 isn't a power of 2.

 

Oops..

 

I tried to make an approximate estimation based on RV770 die (I know it isn't very accurate, but...)

premise: RV870 (Cypress) with its 1600 SPs (5D ALUs), 80 TMUs, 256bit interface, 32 ROPs and front-end (+PCIe and the rest) has 330mm²

Bart (1280 SPs (5D ALUs), 64 TMUs, 256bit , 16 ROPs) ~ 269mm²
Bart (1280 SPs (4D ALUs), 80 TMUs, 256bit , 16 ROPs) ~ 277mm²
Cayman (1920 SPs (5D ALUs), 96 TMUs, 256bit , 32 ROPs) ~ 388mm²
Cayman (1920 SPs (4D ALUs), 120 TMUs, 256bit , 32 ROPs) ~ 400mm²

I made a calculation of RV840's die size, which resulted in ~ 178mm², so these numbers shouldn't be entirelly off. Anyway, they can be off in the case of more significant architectural changes...

 

How many "significant architectural changes" did G71 have compared to G70? Granted the first was on 90 while the latter on 110nm, but if you still compare transistor counts and die area there's something "off" without having any significant changes.

I'm concentrating on your 4D numbers mostly and I'd say you might be off by a small margin

 

48 is not power 2, so its impossible.

 

because of all the SP/TMU fun in this thread; here is my take:

900MHz; 96 TMU's; 384 x 4 SP's (=VEC4); 32 ROPs; 256bit x 1500MHz GDDR5

IMHO the 1920 SP rumor is wrong. Only the HD68xx behaves like it has 1920 SPs (VEC5)

 

Neither is 5. Or 48.

BTW:
„128” would match „4” and „64” and „1920” -. and would lead to 60 TMUs. Given AMDs focus on processing power, that might be an alternative.

Edit 2:
To be a little less unclear: 1.920 in 15 SIMDs with 32 4-way-processors and a Quad-TMU each. You'd need double the Wavefronts in flight though.

 

I am referring to logical/physical simd width, not vliw width.

 

http://www.donanimhaber.com/ekran-karti/haberleri/GeForce-GT-430-12-Ekimde-geliyor-iste-detaylar.htm

Radeon HD 6700 series will launch on October 12.

 

AFAIK, they are grouped in 8's, so while 20 might not be possible, 24 would still make sense and guess what -- it's not a power of 2.

 

I was speculating along the same lines. The lowest priced HD 5850 has fallen to $269 at newegg, with HD 5870 at $349. So it seems reasonable enough for the new parts to be priced at $299 and $399. Im betting both the parts will be equipped with 2GB memory standard

As for the 6770, i dont expect it to be priced greater than $169-179 with the 6750 at $139-149.

Well one could argue that when GTX260 was selling for $449, AMD priced the 4870 at $299 so i think its fair to assume the current pricepoints wont change much. As mentioned above, Im expecting the 6870 to be priced at $399

Well TSMC was supposed to double the supply of 40nm wafers in Q3 but then Nvidia has a lot more chips coming and AMD also has to allocate wafers to Ontario so the supply situation is unclear as of now.

2Gbit GDDR5 chips were also slated for introduction in Q3 so i'd expect Barts to stick with 128 bit so that it could use 4 2Gbit chips to achieve 1 GB. This would be the most cost effective. Juniper was stuck using 8 1Gbit memory chips which increased costs. Similarly Cayman could use the standard 8 memory chips on 256bit for 2GB VRAM

 

http://news.ati-forum.de/index.php/...termin-und-weitere-details-der-hd6000er-serie

 

http://www.chiphell.com/thread-120059-1-1.html

Cayman pro will a bit longer than HD5870.
Core clcok=850Mhz
TDP<200W
Vapor heatsink(Not flat)

 

NICE.

Good work, Team Red. Is the 6800 series launching afterwards?

PS: Dave, would you mind occasionally popping over to the cpu side? I could use a better CPU.

 

Im sorry for the offtopic, im new, but what exactly is Dave Baumann's job at Amd? is he into marketing.. chip designing.. or something else?