AMD: Southern Islands (7*** series) Speculation/ Rumour Thread

They could be 2 for example?

 

well, possibly. but looks like the 77X0s are out of the bag now.

 

60 W?! That's 30 (SP) GFLOPS/W!

 

assuming that its true i wonder if this was expected and what factor it might have had in next gen console specs.

 

Doesn't the first one have 78x0's too?

 

The supposed difference between some of the Cape Verde parts is just 64 which is only 1 CU.
Anyway, we'll see soon enough.

 

Time to retire my 6870, and the 7870 should be a nice replacement. Performance will be 6970:ish?

 

If the rumored specs are true it should bring similar performance.

 

1408 sp's vs 1120? plus all the other goodies in SI?

 

6970 has 1536 sp's, 6950 has 1408 and 6870 has 1120.

edit: the similar performance comment was with regards to 7870 vs 6970 not to his current card.

 

I have the same card undervolted and underclocked, and am also curius about the 7870. It should offer some 25-30% higher performance at 20% lower power draw. (At 100% higher price as well, mind you, at least until nVidia makes a move.) Since I feel no need for higher performance than I have currently, the 7850 is somewhat interesting as well, although gimped cards never held much attraction for me.

Really looking forward to reviews, but rumoured prices seem a bit pretentious at the moment.

 

the whining about pricing is getting tired.

 

Yep for mobile comparison between Kepler.
I think that Pitcairn will consume less watts from Barts (~130/140w).

 

Never said I'd pay the rumored asking price, just that it was an interesting product. These are computer gaming accessories, not cures for cancer. If AMD doesn't come up with a sufficiently attractive deal, I'll simply make do with what I have. Maybe they'll have something more compelling in a couple of years at 20nm, if I'm still in the market at that time.

 

I have a feeling we'll see something like a 7930 in the 350 price range to bridge the gap to the the performance segment.

Similar to how Nvidia had the 8800 GT bridge the gap to the midrange 8600 line.

Either that or AMD are expecting price pressure at some point from Nvidia. As I high doubt 7870 will be priced above 300 USD.

Even Nvidia who like to push the price envelope with enthusiast parts generally don't push the price elasticity of the performance/mainstream or midrange market. There was a similarly large gap between 78xx and 76xx for Nvidia if IIRC.

Regards,
SB

 

You aren't implying as steep a performance cliff between 7900 and lower segment as we had with 8800 vs. 8600, are you?

On paper, 7600 was 7900 cut in half, basically, but with higher frequencies. AMD did similar with 5800 and 5700 albeit without the clock difference. I think that's a quite sensible approach, especially if you've got scaling that's better characterized by core clocks than by unit count as is still the case with SI. HD For that very reason,6870 was a bit too powerful in my books and a bit too cheap, cutting into Cayman Pro's territory. Especially since most games ported from consoles are quite playable at common resolutions with Barts already - that wasn't necessarily the case earlier with 8600/8800.

 

8600 had 1/4 of the shader count of 8800.

radeon HD7800 is expected to have 3/4 of the shader count of radeon HD7900.

 

According to this slides Pitcairn has up to 1408 shaders. Could this really mean, that a Pitcairn GPU could be faster than a HD6970? If the Cape-Verde GPUs are already clocked at 1,0GHz with 896 Shaders at only 60W then a Pitcairn GPU should IMHO also be clocked at up to 1GHz.

so 1000MHz x 1408 / 880 x 1536 = 1,04

I wouldn't be surprised if a Pitcairn-card would have a TDP of <= 130W too, based on the information about Cape Verde on this slide.

At least Pitcairn could be an interesting GPU.

 

If they price it at 299 that would be nice. Also keeping in mind SI does much better over Caymen in any modern/tessellated games than just looked at shaders/clocks would indicate.

So yeah, $299 for greater than 6970 performance might be the first compelling "same performance for less" SI offers, if it comes to pass. Plus there's SI's overclocking to sweeten it further.

That would leave a major 299-449 gap though, watch AMD be lame and charge 349.