AMD: Speculation, Rumors, and Discussion (Archive)

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596mm2/2.5 = 238.4mm2

Raja Koduri: Polaris is 2.5 times brighter today than when Ptolemy observed it in 169 A.D
 
My guess is the poor guy never even imagined the chain of events that blew up from the small numbers in his bio.
Yeah, he very well might've just been bragging about the size of the chip that he worked on.

Do we know of larger chips that have been produced on that process? Are FPGAs and other stuff generally bigger than high perf GPUs?
 
FPGAs can be made huge, but because they consist of ridiculous amounts of the same very small structures replicated over and over again on the chip, each of which can replace any other just depending on how they are connected, they are harvesting heaven. They can be profitably made at huge sizes at processes where absolutely nothing else can come out functional. This is one of the reasons they are among the first to switch.
 
I think the others are rebrands, while Baffin is the pitcairn sized polaris chip that that boffin had written about on linkedin. Quite a few of them have been flying around for the past few months but this is the first time it's named.
 
Banks is a tiny mobile 28nm GPU with 320 SPs, 64bit MC - without UVD, VCE and display outputs. It's desigend for mobile systems with smallest/slowest APUs. VideoCard's speculation about desktop graphics card with Banks is simply wrong - at least display output is expected :). It's probably just a newer revision of Sun/Hainan. Weston is another small 28nm GPU: 384 SPs, 128bit MC, with UVD a probably built on third gen GCN. It seems to be a newer revision of Topaz/Iceland.
 
If those specs are true, I don't see the point in Banks or Weston in anything other than keeping company in Crossfire to a 15W Carrizo or its DDR4 successor.

Then again, all implementations of Carrizo with/without external GPUs have been utter crap. Lenovo even went as far as releasing a laptop with 512 SP Carrizo and a 512 SP dGPU, just to use a single-channel memory motherboard and not allow hybrid Crossfire in the drivers.


Baffin seems to be Polaris 10.
 
I believe Baffin is the bigger 200mm² GPU (Polaris 11?) and Polaris 10 is the smaller one (100mm²). 100mm² wouldn't be enough for 256bit bus.
 
Then again, all implementations of Carrizo with/without external GPUs have been utter crap. Lenovo even went as far as releasing a laptop with 512 SP Carrizo and a 512 SP dGPU, just to use a single-channel memory motherboard and not allow hybrid Crossfire in the drivers.
The HP Elitebook is actually a nice design and supports dual channel memory if configured properly. It's a shame Anandtech didn't receive another stick of memory to test with.
 
Then again, all implementations of Carrizo with/without external GPUs have been utter crap. Lenovo even went as far as releasing a laptop with 512 SP Carrizo and a 512 SP dGPU, just to use a single-channel memory motherboard and not allow hybrid Crossfire in the drivers.

My Acer E5-752G arrived with 2x4GB DIMMs and bandwidth tests tell me it's running dual-channel, although more recent datasheets suggest that Acer might have moved to a single 8GB DIMM in more recent builds. I picked it because (according to the specs) it had dual-channel memory and no dGPU, although in fact it arrived with a Topaz dGPU. That said, even with the presumed lower power limit on the APU it does seem to be comfortably outrunning my desktop Kaveri system in most tests. One thing that surprised me is that the CPU cache subsystem seems to be performing a lot better than previous generations.
 
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