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

Any other info in there that sounds yummy?
Can't use translators at work...

 

Thanks UniveresalTruth!

So this isn't just a quick "launch event" for the mobile stuff that is suppose to be in certain OEM product lines that are launching soon?

Nordic makes it sound much more interesting than that.

 

I think you're mixing up IHV's

 

Bright Side of News: "Radeon HD 7000 Revealed: AMD to Mix GCN with VLIW4 & VLIW5 Architectures"

 

last time i eard about qdr was for a via chipset back in the k7 days

 

That's one bitching GPU. The memory bw is enormous. But is this the end of the road for GDDR5? For memory bw/pin in general?

 

I don't think so. Chips at 7Gbps were announced a while ago, so they'll probably turn up eventually, but I think IHVs are put off by their power consumption for the moment.

Edit: and it's BS News, so there's a pretty good chance that it's BS indeed. Not that it doesn't sound credible, though.

 

So did the supposed former fake product line up that appeared a while ago; ironically if you take that table and replace XDR2 with GDDR5 it's give or take the same stuff as BSN claims.

 

If those are the specs... holy moly. I have one of those please thank you very much. Infact, even though I've been saying I won't be getting a dual GPU card again (I have a 4870x2 atm) I would be inclined to wait around for the 7990. Jeeps. Annouce and release this card already!

 

If it weren't for the "our sources…" stuff, I'd have thought it was a rumor roundup.

 

Basically I agree, but at least one part of the article is so wrong it hurts:

This part is funny, because it is pretty obvious from other leaks and driver entries that

Pitcairn = Wimbledon
Cape Verde = Heathrow & Chelsea
Lombok = Thames.

Especially the 'CV becomes Lombok' part made me laugh, didn't know Lombok was located in London


Another part I'm somewhat sceptical about is the 'all else is VLIW4' claim. Weren't the drivers indicating only a single additional VLIW 4 chip but 3 GCN chips?

I'm sure Lombok/Thames is VLIW, but I'm not entirely sold on CV and Pitcairn being VLIW4 just yet, although there are some reasons why this would make sense.

 

Why do you have to be nit-picky about a few thousand miles?

A good deal of the HD 7000 series might be renamed HD 6000 cards, maybe even a renamed HD 5000 one (bottom end, probably). That would explain there being a few VLIW5 models, but not VLIW4, as I don't think Cayman would be kept around.

 

Dumb question: what are the 64 ROPs good for if the supposed specs are real?

 

And why disable 4 of them when disabling 2 CUs? Past architctures and the GCN diagrams did not have a coupling of ROP count to SIMD/CU count. The primary linkage in the GCN pics was one between the pixel pipes and the L2 cache, which would scale based on the memory bus.

 

There are at least 3 or 4 double-confirmed configurations:

• 384bit GDDR5
• 256bit XDR2
• 384bit QDR DDR5
• 256bit 7Gbps GDDR5
• …

No EDRAM this time?

 

How about it's a wee bit of everything and at the same time an elastic buswidth which can expand according to demands? What do you expect during pre-launch silly season anyway?

 

How exactly would you go from 32ROPs on a 256bit bus to 64ROPs on a 384bit bus?
Unless I missed something about the CU/ROP relationship.

 

AUSUM Atomics. Because Andrew really needs them for his shadows.