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

Z/stencil rate?

 

It's balanced differently.

In the consumer space Pitcairn is arguably better positioned as it doesn't have a lot of things that typical games won't use. On the other hand it's likely going to be quite deficient in one of the market that Tahiti is targetting.

So, long answer short.

Tahiti is unbalanced at the workloads Pitcairn is targetted at.

BUT

Pitcairn is unbalanced at the workloads Tahiti is targetted at.

Regards,
SB

 

That is indeed one aspect AMD hasn't touched for quite some time. Nvidia has had twice the Z/stencil rate per ROP since G80, and AMD stopped increasing it after RV770 for some reason. It's a bit strange, seems like a relatively low-hanging fruit to me.

 

nVidia has 1:8 color:depth in ROPs nowadays, AMD has 1:4, if my memory serves me right

 

Surprised AMD haven't budged on pricing yet, I guess they are happy having the more expensive and often slower GPU compared to Nvidia.

 

how does it go at bit coin mining they could be selling out just from those crazy nutters.

 

A turbo is not needed.. they just set it at 1050mhz and you are on 680 performance. ( not for Dirt3 anyway )
( looking too for they fix some perf problem with FXAA in BF3 and they will allready be at same level there without increasing the clock speed ).

But is it really needed to release a new card ? when factory overclocked ones can take care of this. ( so far MSI, Asus have all been really conservative with 1ghz core speed ( 75mhz OC ).

 

My Sapphire 7970 OC just arrived today; it does 1GHz using less than factory voltage along with 1,450Mhz memory speed. Most people see over 1200MHz on this card, so I don't see why they'd need boost -- they just need more base clock.

 

I think it does quite well, but I'm not sure the Bitcoin crowd is big enough to have any real impact.

Also note that while the 680 is about $50 cheaper in the US, in Europe it appears to be going for the same price as the 7970. I'm not sure why.

 

You do realize that Tahitis have at least 4 different "factory voltages" (IIRC)

 

It comes from the factory with two BIOSes and a toggle switch -- one that is OEM AMD settings but at 950Mhz core, and one that is slightly less voltage, 1GHz core and 1450Mhz ram.

 

Right, but from what I can tell Nvidias double-z still works a lot like the Ultra-Shadow feature of Geforce FX.

 

I don't think AMD would launch something 1.2ghz. Not worth their time and long term stability could be an issue.

This chip was clocked low for a reason and long term stability is likely one of them.

Hardocp got to 1190 with an MSI lightning which has all the above(improved cooling components and etc). Hexus reached 1.175ghz upping the voltage to 1.25 volts on top of putting a extreme accelero cooler on top of the thing(this thing is a 100 dollar cooler). 1.2ghz is pretty high and most 7970 don't reach that with stock volts.

What I mean to get at is getting to 1.2ghz is not as simple as binning when others are failing well before that. A chip has to be supremely stable in all these conditions and more for the lifetime of the product. That means a chip has to be 1.2ghz stable for atleast 3 years and under scenario's the chip hasn't encountered yet.

A lot of people have been having problems with the Leo demo with their overclocks even though they are ok for games. A 1.2 ghz chip would be a long term headache for the company and the binning effort would make way more trouble than its worth to find these golden samples. You would be better off finding these chips and selling them as high end firegl cards than selling it to consumers.

 

The reason was posted here: early wafers indicated 28nm was going to be more troublesome than it has turned out.

But 1.2 GHz seems like wishful thinking in the near term.

So Leo is the new power virus?

 

Could be. The irony. Vrm are reportedly get crazy hot and cards with some people run 100mhz lower with Leo compared to what they thought was stable before.

 

If it's just throttling and not artifacts, it just means that PowerTune is kicking in, not that the chip itself can't handle 1200MHz.

 

Well, there has been almost no supply of 680 to put any pressure on.

Starting to wonder if AMD cant get away with 499 7970 long term instead of 449 though. For these reasons:

-Not always slower than 680
-Better compute/bitcoin
-3GB Ram/better at high res/more bandwidth
-Traditional overclocking ability and seemingly higher overclocking ceiling

All the above would just be strengthened if indeed AMD kicks default clocks up to 1GHZ as rumored

 

To me the real problem with pricing is in the mid end, 78xx are pretty expansive and the new hd 77xx are not that compelling. Nvidia needs to put some pressure on AMD in the 200$ /250 range.
I'm not sure they are that willing to do it, Nvidia architectures usually scales well, it works both way up and down. To match pitcairn they need ~2/3 of the GK104 that around the same size as pitcairn with the same level of perf. I don't have that much hope on them fighting AMD significantly on price in these conditions

They need to introduce half GK104 that would be really compliant part in the 200/250 price bracket. I hope it comes soon. Form AMD side I don't expect much in this price range till their refresh, sadly (they need a "bart"ized parts that would sit between pitcairn and cap verde and pitcairn and tahiti, I'm not sure AMD will try to launch a monster chip to fight in the high end 2x cards aside).

To go back to the high end, I believe that the gk104 launch is a marketing tour de force. The amount of traction Nv seems to have gained from the press reviews is impressive whereas if anything their performance lead shrinked and they sacrificed compute performances (which leads me to believe that actually AMD is winning on a purely technical ground). Both card are a wash and if Nv leads (not always) in power consumption truth is that we haven't seen high card card with that good power characteristics in years so the point is imho a bit moot.

 

Why would they? They have no incentive ot drop the prices yet.

Just looking at Newegg, the GTX 680 is almost constantly out of stock. Which means...

If we then look at Radeon 7970, we see that models there are also still regularly going out of stock.

What does that tell us as a business? Nvidia and AMD after all are businesses.

GTX 680 is priced too low relative to supply. Nvidia is selling every card they can make. But at the moment they are leaving quite a bit of money on the table and more importantly, they are giving customer's a reason to buy a 7970.

Radeon 7970 is still priced just about at the right place with regards to supply. And if someone doesn't feel like waiting for GTX 680 to come back into stock they can pick up a 7970.

Sure the GTX 680 is cheaper. And at stock it's certainly a small bit faster. But if you're buying a 500+ USD video card, then there's a higher likelyhood of overclocking coming into play.

And an overclocked 7970 and an overclocked GTX 680 are roughly the same speed at 1920x1200 and lower. While at 2560x1600 and higher (including multimonitor) the edge goes to the 7970, especially when both are overclocked. So for those users, even a 50 USD price premium might be worth it for the better performance at their typical gaming resolutions.

Basically it doesn't matter what Nvidia price their cards at. Until it starts to impact the supply versus demand situation of the 7970, the price for the 79xx cards isn't going to change.

Once GTX 680 starts to significantly impact that supply versus demand relationship, that's when we'll finally see 7970 prices drop. Doing otherwise just means leaving money on the table... Once we start seeing frequent rebate offers on 79xx cards, that'll be a likely indication that prices might soon drop across the board. No clue when or if that'll happen though.

Regards,
SB

PS - before anyone jumps to any sort of conclusions, I'm NOT saying supply is low for either company. Only taking note of how current supply levels relate to current demand levels.