Monday, December 13th 2010
AMD Cayman Taken Apart, PCB Pictured
We've seen quite a few pictures of the AMD Radeon HD 6970 from its exterior, including some finer details observable. For the first time, we're getting to take a peek inside, thanks to a Chinese website that looks to be auctioning off an HD 6970 ahead of launch for a quick buck, if we're not terribly mistaken. The PCB shot reveals many details about the GPU and its board design:
Images Courtesy: Taobao.com
- To begin with, the GPU indeed has a 256-bit wide memory interface, counting the memory chips on the obverse side, and looking at the size of the GPU package.
- The size of the die, and taken that Cayman is a 40 nm GPU, indicate that Cayman is not much bigger than Cypress, it should be about 400~500 million transistors higher compared to Cypress.
- Given the roughly 2500 million transistor count, the stream core count of 1536 seems more realistic. AMD is said to be using an architecturally superior VLIW4 stream processor design that increases performance per mm² die area.
- The board uses a high-grade 6+2+1+1 phase digital PWM voltage regulation design, draws power from 8+6 pin power connectors.
- The reverse side of the PCB has no memory chips, so AMD might be using 2 Gbit memory chips to get 2 GB of total memory
37 Comments on AMD Cayman Taken Apart, PCB Pictured
I see only 6+1+1+1:
6× Volterra VT1165SF for vGPU
1× Volterra VT1175SF for vDDCI (GDDR5 memctrl) (near CF fingers)
1× Volterra VT242WF for memory vDD
1× Volterra VT242WF for memory vDDQ
fail for amd fanboys
nice card btw
You either back that up with real info or I'm nailing you to the wall!
Kinda glad they put it back as now hopefully Thermaltake will do a 3rd party VRM cooler for it :). And hopefully some one will do a screw on type ram cooling unless the older 4970\90 one fits.
backplates float my boat.
6pin peg connector +8pin peg connector says enough, that around 300wat with the 75 watts you wil get out of the pci-e 2.0 slot
Another example: ATI Radeon 5670. Some models come with a 6 pin PCIe connector, others don't. It is highly unlikely that a 400sp chip consumes 150w of power.
TL;DR: Maybe AMD wants us to have some more overclocking headroom. But for now, we should wait for some actual reviews before we go calling this a GTX 480.