DuckThor Evil
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I'd be quite surprised if the high end don't see a new GPUs from both manufacturers next year, the fact that it doesn't need to be close to 600mm2 makes it more likely to happen. Should be interesting year regardless.
The AMD Execution Thread [2007 - 2017]
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But the fact that both IHVs are using a new process makes it less probable to launch the big chips at first.
For 28nm, nVidia launched GK104 (~300mm^2) in March 2012, and the first GK110 card (Tesla K20?) was only available about a year later.
For 40nm, AMD started with a 137mm^2 GPU (RV740) and nVidia with a 144mm^2 one (GT215) in late 2009. Bigger GPUs at 40nm only appeared in the next year, already part of a new generation.
If AMD debuts 16FF with a 400mm^2 GPU, it'll probably be the first time an IHV launches such a big chip with a new process. And one that would instantly cannibalize their newest GPU to date.
So yeah, I think if AMD gets to launch their 16FF cards first, I think they will target the performance brackets of GM204 and GM107.
I think it's too early to declare carrizo a failure. It's just getting started. We should know in a couple quarters.
None of this type of stuff actually exists of course!
AMD drops support for non GCN based graphics cards
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-drops-support-for-non-gcn-based-graphics-cards.html
Even then-top-of-the-line 6970 can't run a relatively graphics-light game like World of Warcraft at 1080P with maxed settings anymore (and AA entirely turned off by the way), so I'm not really surprised they're dropping support. These GPUs are getting long in the tooth, and are slow by today's standards.
By the way, got off the hook earlier today with the guy servicing my PC; graphics card blew, apparently... ASUS high-end board; solid-state caps (supposedly anyway); they still stink to high heavens when they go... 
I'm getting it replaced with another 390X now, so I won't have to move over the one I bought last week. Hopefully, this one won't blow up as well.
By the way, Orangelupa isn't the only guy unlucky with technical stuff sometimes; this is the third graphics board I'm replacing in this PC. First two were GF 770GTXes that had fan bearings which dried out because of heatstroke when stacked tightly in SLI. After the second, replacement 770's fans also started whirring and rattling I had had enough and switched to a single card instead. ...Which doesn't always help, lol.
I'm getting it replaced with another 390X now, so I won't have to move over the one I bought last week. Hopefully, this one won't blow up as well.By the way, Orangelupa isn't the only guy unlucky with technical stuff sometimes; this is the third graphics board I'm replacing in this PC. First two were GF 770GTXes that had fan bearings which dried out because of heatstroke when stacked tightly in SLI. After the second, replacement 770's fans also started whirring and rattling I had had enough and switched to a single card instead. ...Which doesn't always help, lol.
By the way, got off the hook earlier today with the guy servicing my PC; graphics card blew, apparently... ASUS high-end board; solid-state caps (supposedly anyway); they still stink to high heavens when they go...
By the way, Orangelupa isn't the only guy unlucky with technical stuff sometimes; this is the third graphics board I'm replacing in this PC. First two were GF 770GTXes that had fan bearings which dried out because of heatstroke when stacked tightly in SLI. After the second, replacement 770's fans also started whirring and rattling I had had enough and switched to a single card instead. ...Which doesn't always help, lol.
Telling you its all that porn, porn is bad!, not only will you go blind it will screw up your graphics cards!
WoW is an old game with a decade of stuff being added, I doubt the game is a good example of anything, it's very CPU limited during heavy gameplay, scales poorly, also if the 6970 is slow on it I bet a lot of the $100 and lower GCN/Nvidia cards are doing the same, thing is, the 6970 supports DX11, all current games are using DX11.
from what I've been looking on benchmarks, for the games released in 2015 a 6970 still manages to give performance near a 260X on most of them, and 260X offers similar quality on most games to the consoles, so it can't be that bad.
it's official now, but the level of support for pre-GCN cards have been reduced for a long time, they didn't add any of the new driver features during the last few years that they could (things that don't require GCN), and performance optimization/bug fixes seemed not so good, while Nvidia's support for Fermi (older than the 6970) looks better, they added new driver features (like adaptive vsync, downsampling) and apparently will add DX12 support/WDDM 2.0 drivers, so it's a big win for Nvidia when it comes to old products support.
let's not forget, things like Richland APU are also dropped (their main APU until Kaveri last year), and the odd rebranded cards like the "r5 230"
also, unfortunately AMD is lacking when it comes to very basic support for old products, Nvidia went as far as releasing a windows 10 driver for all their DX10 cards, going back to G80 from 2006, AMD didn't, they only offer some windows 7 driver via windows update with no working control panel for windows 10 and DX10 cards.
I noticed on my VLIW Radeon that OpenCL support was removed with the latest driver?!
They've modernized the engine a lot in recent years, starting in Mists of Pandaria in particular with adding DX11 support, Warlords added a lot of new stuff also and even more is coming in Legion.
Also, the box I had the 6970 in has a strong CPU, and game was still running like a dog on high settings. So it's not (as) CPU limited as you claim, really. It's just an old GPU which isn't good anymore, and which arguably isn't good for gaming period unless you have a third-party cooler on it, due to the horrendous fan noise of the reference model.
If this card is slow in friggin WoW, it's going to be really, really slow in any modern DX11 title, so that's not much of an advantage.
Why would you even care? OCL performance is terrible on pre-GCN. Last thing you'd want is running serious OCL stuff on a 6970, it's basically just a 200+ watt space heater. I tried some Folding@Home on mine a while ago, and a work unit my 290X chews through in 2 1/2 hours would take 1 1/4 DAY of the fan switching between hypervelocity and warp speed, and GPU temps still hitting over 90C. I let it run for maybe six hours, trying to get through that one work unit so it wouldn't go to waste but had to give up due to the noise, the temperatures and just plain waste of electricity.
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The 6970 is still a pretty powerful chip. Looking at 2013's benchmarks, its performance should stand between the full Bonaire XT (R7 260X) and a Pitcairn Pro (R7 370).
Even if drivers for GCN have come a long way since 2013, the 6970 should still be faster than most laptop GPU offerings (GTX 960M and lower).
I have a very hard time believing that you can't play WoW with decent framerates with a GTX 960M.
EDIT: Just found a benchmark graph where the 6950 gets 25 FPS on 1080p+CMAA+ max settings on warlords, so the 6970 should have no trouble getting over 30 FPS using high settings at 1080p.
So there may have been something wrong with your previous setup. Maybe the graphics card got so old that the thermal paste dried up (happened to my laptop this year) and the GPU was constantly throttling?
Even if drivers for GCN have come a long way since 2013, the 6970 should still be faster than most laptop GPU offerings (GTX 960M and lower).
I have a very hard time believing that you can't play WoW with decent framerates with a GTX 960M.
EDIT: Just found a benchmark graph where the 6950 gets 25 FPS on 1080p+CMAA+ max settings on warlords, so the 6970 should have no trouble getting over 30 FPS using high settings at 1080p.
So there may have been something wrong with your previous setup. Maybe the graphics card got so old that the thermal paste dried up (happened to my laptop this year) and the GPU was constantly throttling?
I just replaced my unlocked 2GB 6950 with a GTX 970. It's been a really good run with that card. It's a shame that AMD always drops support before NV does though. And their "legacy support" tends to be pretty awful.
I have a notebook with an 860M (aka 960M) and in my experience the 6970 has a bit of an edge. That WoW chart is bizarre, with a 460 well ahead of a 6950. It's possible AMD hasn't been maintaining the VLIW4 drivers much for newer games.
I have a notebook with an 860M (aka 960M) and in my experience the 6970 has a bit of an edge. That WoW chart is bizarre, with a 460 well ahead of a 6950. It's possible AMD hasn't been maintaining the VLIW4 drivers much for newer games.
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They've modernized the engine a lot in recent years, starting in Mists of Pandaria in particular with adding DX11 support, Warlords added a lot of new stuff also and even more is coming in Legion.
Also, the box I had the 6970 in has a strong CPU, and game was still running like a dog on high settings. So it's not (as) CPU limited as you claim, really. It's just an old GPU which isn't good anymore, and which arguably isn't good for gaming period unless you have a third-party cooler on it, due to the horrendous fan noise of the reference model.
If this card is slow in friggin WoW, it's going to be really, really slow in any modern DX11 title, so that's not much of an advantage.
Why would you even care? OCL performance is terrible on pre-GCN. Last thing you'd want is running serious OCL stuff on a 6970, it's basically just a 200+ watt space heater. I tried some Folding@Home on mine a while ago, and a work unit my 290X chews through in 2 1/2 hours would take 1 1/4 DAY of the fan switching between hypervelocity and warp speed, and GPU temps still hitting over 90C. I let it run for maybe six hours, trying to get through that one work unit so it wouldn't go to waste but had to give up due to the noise, the temperatures and just plain waste of electricity.
as modernized as it is, it's WoW, very old engine and game with stuff added, hardly a good example of DX11 game, and the graphic posted above is a clear indication that something is wrong with this game in particular, a 6950 should not be this slow compared to Fermi cards, so this is a very bad example, also you can drop quality settings when performance is not good with max settings, but if you find a serious bug you might be out of options with an unsupported product.
even on the latest Assassins Creed, which is very heavy and I doubt anyone is worried about VLIW Radeons in it, the 6970 is not far from a 260X (same level as consoles) and ahead of the Fermi cards!
http://pclab.pl/art67022-4.html
now imagine if it had proper support and optimization going on.
trying to justify this based on performance (specially from WoW!) seems really poor, i
OpenCL perf is not useless on the DX11 VLIW cards, they greatly improved performance compared to the DX10 VLIW cards.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5625/...-7850-review-rounding-out-southern-islands/15
and it's not just about benchmarks some commercial softwares can use OpenCL on old radeons well, like the Adobe stuff, with the latest driver support was simply removed by AMD.
I didn't say it was a "good example" - which is a subjective statement anyhow - now did I?
Not seeing any chart. Also, LOL @ "this chart doesn't show what I want it to show, so I'm going to dismiss it". That's just plain selection bias.
Fact: WoW runs poorly on 6970. Changing only video card and keeping all other factors the same: now the game runs well. Who is at fault: THE GAME?
It's a half-decade old video card. What more do you want? It had a good run; now it's time to move on.
Besides, AMD's going fucking bankrupt, if you hadn't noticed: maybe it's better they focus their limited resources on stuff that actually matters and might make them some money.
Oh yeah? Well, all is relative I guess, but "greatly improved" VLIW4 compared to VLIW5 still isn't good compared to GCN, because the VLIW-based GPUs aren't good at general computing. Corner cases, okay. Sure, here and there you find an example where they shine, at one time I ran Milkyway@home via BOINC, and 6970 beat everything else available at the time by a mile, high-end NV cards included. But isolated cases are isolated cases.
So use an older driver then, or get over yourself. Half-decade old card, bankruptcy proceedings, hello?
Let's be realistic here for once, okay?
the problem for me is that you dismiss the 6970 as a usable card for current DX11 gaming because it didn't perform as you hoped for on WoW at max settings, when it can play other more advanced games near consoles levels, and cards older than the 6900, that typically perform worse, are performing a lot better on WoW max settings, so I don't see it as all that relevant (apart for people playing WoW at max settings), I don't think this is good enough to justify the end of support or not.
it's not VLIW5 vs VLIW4 on OpenCL you can observe the 5870 having not so bad results, the big jump was from the 4000 to the 5000 series,
Luxmark is a widely accepted OpenCL benchmark, the VLIW DX11 cards are not great by any means, but they are far from just space heaters as you classified them.
I understand that AMD is in a bad position, but ending support for these DX11 GPUs NOW, I don't see it as a win,
Nvidia, their only competitor for this, is very clever with how they are handling it I think, and I really doubt that it's such a big distraction from the newer series which is their main focus anyway.
some might start having doubts about other things like, GCN 1.0 is from almost 4 years ago, and they still sell them new (like the r7 370), I look at Richland which seems like a recent enough product and can still be bought new everywhere and it's now legacy status, also with their APUs they always heavily used OpenCL for marketing, have they dropped OpenCL just from my card with the latest drivers, or also for the Richland APUs?
on a positive note, they released the fix for the fan speed bug also for the legacy driver it seems.
it's not VLIW5 vs VLIW4 on OpenCL you can observe the 5870 having not so bad results, the big jump was from the 4000 to the 5000 series,
Luxmark is a widely accepted OpenCL benchmark, the VLIW DX11 cards are not great by any means, but they are far from just space heaters as you classified them.
I understand that AMD is in a bad position, but ending support for these DX11 GPUs NOW, I don't see it as a win,
Nvidia, their only competitor for this, is very clever with how they are handling it I think, and I really doubt that it's such a big distraction from the newer series which is their main focus anyway.
some might start having doubts about other things like, GCN 1.0 is from almost 4 years ago, and they still sell them new (like the r7 370), I look at Richland which seems like a recent enough product and can still be bought new everywhere and it's now legacy status, also with their APUs they always heavily used OpenCL for marketing, have they dropped OpenCL just from my card with the latest drivers, or also for the Richland APUs?
on a positive note, they released the fix for the fan speed bug also for the legacy driver it seems.
The R700 Series had a compatability issue with the local data sharing and OCL, so AMD chose to "flush" all thread-group communication into the global memory, since it would have been even slower otherwise. I'm not sure how much this has an impact on the accelerated path-tracing performance, since Evergreen also got some major ISA upgrades alongside doubling the compute throughput, and I don't think AMD bothered too much on the OpenCL ICD for R700 after the Evergreen debut anyway.
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