# AMD Cayman, Antilles Specifications Surface



## btarunr (Nov 22, 2010)

At last, specifications of AMD's elusive Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6990 graphics accelerators made it to the internet, with slides exposing details such as stream processor count. The Radeon HD 6970 is based on a new 40 nm GPU by AMD, codenamed "Cayman". The dual-GPU accelerator being designed using two Cayman GPUs is codenamed "Antilles", and carries the product name Radeon HD 6990. 

Cayman packs 1920 stream processors, spread across 30 SIMD engines, indicating the 4D stream processor architecture, generating single-precision computational power of 3 TFLOPs. It packs 96 TMUs, 128 Z/Stencil ROPs, and 32 color ROPs. Its memory bandwidth of 160 GB/s indicates that it uses a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. The memory amount, however, seems to have been doubled to 2 GB on the Radeon HD 6970. Antilles uses two of these Cayman GPUs, combined computational power of 6 TFLOPs, a total of 3840 stream processors, total memory bandwidth of 307.2 GB/s, a total of 4 GB of memory, load and idle board power ratings at 300W and 30W, respectively. 





*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## Over_Lord (Nov 22, 2010)

160GBPS that's it??? WHAT SHIT GTX580 is near 200GBPS


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Nov 22, 2010)

So the memory is only 5000 effective? Thought they we're confirmed as using chips rated for 6000.


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## ariff_tech (Nov 22, 2010)

3840/2 = 1920

6970 would only have 1920 stream processor.
it couldn't beat GTX580.

i hope 6970 would be double of 6870.
this will surely beat GTX580.

i will stick with my 5870 E6.


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## newfellow (Nov 22, 2010)

thunderising said:


> 160GBPS that's it??? WHAT SHIT GTX580 is near 200GBPS



Although, threaded AMD promises, but I have to agree this is incredible weak show from AMD.

Considering AMD/ATI is at huge issues with driver, BIOSes and all software of software issues + the fact that they have delay issues and nothing(as in new games) never seems to work correctly on their GPUs it is pretty funny..

(and nobody dare to accuse me an 'NVIDIA' fanboy I own only AMD/ATI GPUs atm a lot of them and I've been fixing their drivers for past 6 months almost every day basis.)


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Nov 22, 2010)

ariff_tech said:


> 3840/2 = 1920
> 
> 6970 would only have 1920 stream processor.
> it couldn't beat GTX580.
> ...



A 6870 offers 73% of a 580's performance with 1120 shaders. I doubt that it'd take double that to match a 580.


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## leonard_222003 (Nov 22, 2010)

newfellow said:


> (and nobody dare to accuse me an 'NVIDIA' fanboy I own only AMD/ATI GPUs atm a lot of them and *I've been fixing their drivers for past 6 months almost every day basis*.)



You've been fixing their drivers ? yeah , for sure nobody will say you are a fanboy when you say you are fixing their drivers , what you do ? fix the inf ? ini ?   , fanboys never cease to amaze the world with statements like this , from the i owned everything ati made to fixing drivers and probably making GPU's one day , something like " i made the Ati gpu and i know it sucks"  , i won't say Nvidia is better but read bettwen the lines  .


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## Fourstaff (Nov 22, 2010)

+1 on that, it seems that 6990 will smoke GTX580's ass. 

I have never encountered a problem with ATi's graphics card, my old X300 is still happy inside my parent's pc, and my lappy's 4570 has not overheated (unlike my 8400GS). Never had any problems on the driver side either.

Edit: any chance of seeing 6850X2/6870X2? From benchies, it seems that those two cards provide a lot of crossfire power and should cost less than a GTX580 while delivering more performance.


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## Frick (Nov 22, 2010)

newfellow said:


> (and nobody dare to accuse me an 'NVIDIA' fanboy I own only AMD/ATI GPUs atm a lot of them and I've been fixing their drivers for past 6 months almost every day basis.)



That's wierd, I have the opposite problem. AMD/ATI drivers have always worked like a charm, but Nvidia's just doesn't play well with my system. It might be something else beneath it though, sometimes I think the motherboard is bad.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Nov 22, 2010)

Eh. If people want to get into the driver thing again then try this thread http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=134359

Though there's not much else to add at this point.


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## Hayder_Master (Nov 22, 2010)

more stream processors 
more stream processors 
more stream processors 
and more stream processors = HD 9990


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## afw (Nov 22, 2010)

300W ... ???  ... even the 6870 is rated as 151W IIRC ... this has more than 2x6870 SPs and still needs 300W ...


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## bear jesus (Nov 22, 2010)

thunderising said:


> 160GBPS that's it??? WHAT SHIT GTX580 is near 200GBPS





LAN_deRf_HA said:


> So the memory is only 5000 effective? Thought they we're confirmed as using chips rated for 6000.



Didn't the 5870 have 4800mhz and the 5970 have 4000mhz ? Could the 6970 have 5800mhz and the 6990 have 5000mhz?

After spending some time using only one of my 6870's to find out it's almost enough to max out most of the games i play at 5040x1050 i think selling my 6870's and getting one 6970 would give me the power to game over 3 monitors and no crossfire worry's  i look forward to the reviews.


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## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

96 TMU cannot be correct. You can't divide 96 TMU on 30 SIMDs. 96/30 = 3.2

On top of that the TMU number per SIMD is always a power of 2 and has always been 4 so far on AMD cards. 30 SIMDs most probably means 120 TMUs.

Only other posibility is that Cayman is still 5D and has 24 SIMDs. 1920/80 = 24. Then all the numbers provided here match up. (24 x 4 = 96 TMU)


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## Fourstaff (Nov 22, 2010)

afw said:


> 300W ... ???  ... even the 6870 is rated as 151W IIRC ... this has more than 2x6870 SPs and still needs 300W ...



5970 drinks a max of ~300w, 5870 takes in ~210w, so there's your answer. (no doubt they will underclock the 6990 compared to 6970)


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## Swamp Monster (Nov 22, 2010)

afw said:


> 300W ... ???  ... even the 6870 is rated as 151W IIRC ... this has more than 2x6870 SPs and still needs 300W ...



Not sure what you trying to say, but 6990 is using 300W, not 6970.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Nov 22, 2010)

The other slide.


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## bear jesus (Nov 22, 2010)

LAN_deRf_HA said:


> The other slide.
> 
> http://www.rumorpedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/radeonhd6970.gif



Awww 160gb/s  hopefully it's not a bottleneck.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Nov 22, 2010)

I'm really hoping the chips are rated for 6000 effective and they're just being conservative. OC'ing to that would bring the bandwidth up majorly to 192gb/s.

Edit* More slides, and one that conflicts with the one I posted. "TBA" on those specs. http://www.arabhardware.net/forum/showpost.php?p=1646720&postcount=1523


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## Swamp Monster (Nov 22, 2010)

bear jesus said:


> Awww 160gb/s  hopefully it's not a bottleneck.



yes, it seems there isn't much changes on memory side. I hope It will do fine.


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## Over_Lord (Nov 22, 2010)

bear jesus said:


> Awww 160gb/s  hopefully it's not a bottleneck.



wanna bet?


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## poo417 (Nov 22, 2010)

bear jesus said:


> Awww 160gb/s  hopefully it's not a bottleneck.



The memory bottleneck was a myth on the 5xxx series.  You could over clock the memory on my old 5970 from 1000 - 1200 and gain a few percent performance.  Overclocking the GPU on the other hand form 725 - 900 was a HUGE jump in performance.  The problem with the cards was a lack of memory on very res with AA.  At 6050 x 1080 AA with a lot of games was not possible.  

My 480's regularly use more than 1 GB in games at that res.  Hell there is even a few games that use more than 1 GB at 1920 x 1080 with 4/8 x AA.

Overclocking the memory on the 480's does very little as well.  Again OC the GPU massive jump in performance in most games.


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## buggalugs (Nov 22, 2010)

newfellow said:


> Although, threaded AMD promises, but I have to agree this is incredible weak show from AMD.
> 
> Considering AMD/ATI is at huge issues with driver, BIOSes and all software of software issues + the fact that they have delay issues and nothing(as in new games) never seems to work correctly on their GPUs it is pretty funny..
> 
> (and nobody dare to accuse me an 'NVIDIA' fanboy I own only AMD/ATI GPUs atm a lot of them and I've been fixing their drivers for past 6 months almost every day basis.)



Dude, I play most of the new games when they come out and havent had any issues with any driver.

Maybe you could ask a friend to teach you how to build and maintain a computer properly because its not normal to have so many problems.

 AMD doesnt ban people for complaining from the website either unless you were acting like a tool.


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## Imsochobo (Nov 22, 2010)

buggalugs said:


> Dude, I play most of the new games when they come out and havent had any issues with any driver.
> 
> Maybe you could ask a friend to teach you how to build and maintain a computer properly because its not normal to have so many problems.
> 
> AMD doesnt ban people for complaining from the website either unless you were acting like a tool.



Ran 10,4 with my 5850, playd all new titles, so does 6 friends with the 5 series... no problems.
soo... your doing something wrong...
obviously since we run 10 000 laptops at work and we've had no complaints about ati cards from any.
ati's rma rate is also EXACTLY the same as nvidia... highest rma cards is 4870X2 and then GTX 295.


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## ariff_tech (Nov 22, 2010)

LAN_deRf_HA said:


> A 6870 offers 73% of a 580's performance with 1120 shaders. I doubt that it'd take double that to match a 580.



Dual 6870 can beat 5970, and GTX 580 couldnt beat 5970.
But only if cayman have enough bandwidth (512bit memory perhaps)

Let wait for the review and see,
but power consumption look promising, 300W for dual Cayman, that's great
and support 8 display


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## bear jesus (Nov 22, 2010)

poo417 said:


> The memory bottleneck was a myth on the 5xxx series.  You could over clock the memory on my old 5970 from 1000 - 1200 and gain a few percent performance.  Overclocking the GPU on the other hand form 725 - 900 was a HUGE jump in performance.  The problem with the cards was a lack of memory on very res with AA.  At 6050 x 1080 AA with a lot of games was not possible.
> 
> My 480's regularly use more than 1 GB in games at that res.  Hell there is even a few games that use more than 1 GB at 1920 x 1080 with 4/8 x AA.
> 
> Overclocking the memory on the 480's does very little as well.  Again OC the GPU massive jump in performance in most games.



Most of the games i can't max on a single card it's often the AA that can't be maxed at 5040x1050 and the same applies to when I'm using 2 cards so i assume it is due to running out of vram.

I really hope the 6970 is about the speed of 6870 crossfire (although only due to imperfect scaling thus 1920 sp's being about the same performance as 2240 in crossfire) but excels anywhere that vram is a limit, If so i will be saying goodbye to my 6870's as i have never been a fan of dual card setups, i just got these because i could not wait any more


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## Aditya (Nov 22, 2010)

ariff_tech said:


> 3840/2 = 1920
> 
> 6970 would only have 1920 stream processor.
> it couldn't beat GTX580.
> ...



But 6 series are meant to be value budget cards,so you cant blame them for not competing with a very costly card!


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## NdMk2o1o (Nov 22, 2010)

Aditya said:


> But 6 series are meant to be value budget cards,so you cant blame them for not competing with a very costly card!



Sorry, where did you hear that?


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

Did anyone notice this one has 2 polygons per clock vs 1 from the last gen?


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## wahdangun (Nov 22, 2010)

TheMailMan78 said:


> Did anyone notice this one has 2 polygons per clock vs 1 from the last gen?



yes, so i hope thats mean each shader core was 2x the performance of cypress


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## bear jesus (Nov 22, 2010)

TheMailMan78 said:


> Did anyone notice this one has 2 polygons per clock vs 1 from the last gen?



Yes but didn't have a clue what relevance it had, are the 68xx cards 1 per clock like the last gen as well?

Is it kind of like doubling the ipc for a cpu or something? I'm kind of curious what effect  on performance it will have.


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

wahdangun said:


> yes, so i hope thats mean each shader core was 2x the performance of cypress



Thats what I'm thinking. People get hung up on clocks and neglect the basics. We will just have to wait and see some benched. That and did you notice this bitch is 4 gigs!


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## Lionheart (Nov 22, 2010)

I will take 2 HD6990's in Xfire thankyou


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## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

LAN_deRf_HA said:


> The other slide.
> 
> http://www.rumorpedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/radeonhd6970.gif



These slides are looking fake to me by the moment. Like I said 30 SIMD and 96 texture units are not posible, unless the architecture is radically different and they're doing something like: 5 SIMDs are packed along with 16 texture units in some kind of cluster or something strange like that (which is not good for harvesting). The previous modular approach by AMD was "clusters" of 1 SIMD + 4 TMUs and this way they could disable each failing cluster "individually" in order to harvest the chips and make the HD5850 or 5830. The 5 SIMD + 16 TMU clusters would be highly innefficient when it comes to harvesting the GPUs as any error would render 1/6th of the chip unusable, but then again maybe they did that and that's why they are having so bad yields and had to delay the release.

Summarizing, I fail to see how 96 TMU can be evenly split into 30 clusters, so I think the slides are fake until proven wrong.

@ 2 polygons per clock

It only means that it can calculate and rasterize 2 polygons per clock. Nothing to do with shader performance. It will arguably have an effect on tesselation performance, but in theory, judging by specs and theoretical throughoutput, it shouldn't have any effect tbh: even at 1 poly/clock the previous gen (including Barts) should be able to perform 725-900 million polygons/s (like 12-15 million polys per frame @60 fps), which is much much more than any scene has even with superextreme tesselation. To make an idea, a 1920x1200 picture has 2.3 million pixels, so a 12-15 milion poly scene would have an average of 5-8 polys per pixel, that is, using the wireframe mode on Heaven benchmark would render a completely white screen. Not some parts appearing almost white like Heaven Extreme setting does, no, completely white. And it would happen almost the same even with 2.3 million polys which is 1/8 of Cypress theorethical capabilities. What I mean is that if the specs for Cypress were real or anything close to realistic (i.e actual throughoutput being 1/8 of the speced one), there should be no significant improvement, because Cypress/Barts shouldn't be bottlenecked to begin with.


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## left4lol (Nov 22, 2010)

LAN_deRf_HA said:


> The other slide.
> 
> http://www.rumorpedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/radeonhd6970.gif


Those slide are fake this is the real slide 




some other slide


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## Fourstaff (Nov 22, 2010)

I have a question, is the 69xx architecture an extended version of the 68xx architecture or is it another experiment from AMD? Based on the details of the slides, it looks like the 69xx and the 68xx TMU/cluster is different (thanks for prompting me to do the search, Benetanegia).


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## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

left4lol said:


> Those slide are fake this is the real slide
> http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=fot_019udly.jpg
> http://www.abload.de/thumb/fot_019udly.jpg
> some other slide
> ...



LOL. Thanks.

Interesting thing in those slides is that AMD is going to contain TDP too and by the looks of it far more extensively than Nvidia did with the GTX580 (i.e Nvidia only does it on Furmark, etc.). I wonder what people will say about that. I'm prepared for the hypocrisy.

I'm not against those measures btw, and I think that the implementation shown in those slides is better than Nvidia's, mostly because it always works and because it can be tunned by advanced users. Fact still remains that average users might end up with reduced performance in some cases or with pointless/counterproductive overclocks. Mostly what everone feared about the feature in GTX580 looks like it's 10x worse on Cayman.

Also the fact that SIMD units are not yet determined does suggest that the rumors about bad yields were correct. GTX480 AMD version reloaded here we come... (maybe not, but that's what TBD suggests at this point (Oct 2010))


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

Benetanegia said:


> LOL. Thanks.
> 
> Interesting thing in those slides is that AMD is going to contain TDP too and by the looks of it far more extensively than Nvidia did with the GTX580 (i.e Nvidia only does it on Furmark, etc.). I wonder what people will say about that. I'm prepared for the hypocrisy.
> 
> ...



Are you referring to the throttling?


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## Swamp Monster (Nov 22, 2010)

left4lol said:


> Those slide are fake this is the real slide



I doubt this slide is real too, because of TBD of some values in it. Come on, it is already November 22!


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## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

TheMailMan78 said:


> Are you referring to the throttling?



This:
http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=fot_024ofv9.jpg

and this:
http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=fot_023xhnq.jpg

. Clamps GPU TDP to a pre-determined level.
. Integrated power control processor monitors power draw every clock cycle
  . Dynamically adjusts clocks for various blocks to enforce TDP
. Provides direct control over GPU power draw (as opposed to indirec via clock/voltage tweaks)
. etc...


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

Benetanegia said:


> This:
> http://www.abload.de/image.php?img=fot_024ofv9.jpg
> 
> and this:
> ...



Yeah. I don't like the fact I have less control. Of course that wasn't a big problem on the 580 anymore then anything else. My issue with ALL these cards is I want to decide what I can and cannot do via voltage and clocks. ATI or Nvidia. If I want to dump water on one and knock the volts up to 3v then so F$#KING be it.

However I know why they are doing this. Every jackass on the planet now is an "expert" overclocker. This is just warranty control IMO.


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## H82LUZ73 (Nov 22, 2010)

btarunr said:


> At last, specifications of AMD's elusive Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6990 graphics accelerators made it to the internet, with slides exposing details such as stream processor count. The Radeon HD 6970 is based on a new 40 nm GPU by AMD, codenamed "Cayman". The dual-GPU accelerator being designed using two Cayman GPUs is codenamed "Antilles", and carries the product name Radeon HD 6990.
> 
> Cayman packs 1920 stream processors, spread across 30 SIMD engines, indicating the 4D stream processor architecture, generating single-precision computational power of 3 TFLOPs. It packs 96 TMUs, 128 Z/Stencil ROPs, and 32 color ROPs. Its memory bandwidth of 160 GB/s indicates that it uses a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. The memory amount, however, seems to have been doubled to 2 GB on the Radeon HD 6970. Antilles uses two of these Cayman GPUs, combined computational power of 6 TFLOPs, a total of 3840 stream processors, total memory bandwidth of 307.2 GB/s, a total of 4 GB of memory, load and idle board power ratings at 300W and 30W, respectively.
> 
> ...




 Ok look at this slides date guys and cut half of the memory gb/s and you have 6970 those other slides look like a presentation for internal use why they are dated October .


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## entropy13 (Nov 22, 2010)

TheMailMan78 said:


> Yeah. I don't like the fact I have less control. Of course that wasn't a big problem on the 580 anymore then anything else. My issue with ALL these cards is I want to decide what I can and cannot do via voltage and clocks. ATI or Nvidia. If I want to dump water on one and knock the volts up to 3v then so F$#KING be it.
> 
> However I know why they are doing this. Every jackass on the planet now is an "expert" overclocker. This is just warranty control IMO.



You can change settings related to it in the AMD Overdrive section.

"User controllable via AMD Overdrive Utility."


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## HalfAHertz (Nov 22, 2010)

The TMUs were linked to the ROPs not to the SPs last time I checked, so 96 could very well be true.
But to be honest I share your concerns about the low yields. If they were truly having problems with pcb components and not the chips themselves, they wouldn't have left so many things unspecified. Unless of course they're trying to mislead Nvidia about the performance figures? But that would be pointless at this point imo...

I am pretty sure AMD will be torn by the performance community about the TDP limiter, unless they make an easy opt-out solution in the drivers.


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## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

entropy13 said:


> You can change settings related to it in the AMD Overdrive section.
> 
> "User controllable via AMD Overdrive Utility."



Yup. I was going to tell him that.

The problem is for average users and most probably with factory overclocked cards. How is that going to work? Very few people use Overdrive, at least that I know of. And none of the non-enthusiast friends would ever use it, that's why pre-overclocked cards exist, because most people don't OC themselves or they only do the basic upping the clock slide and see what happens. That's all they want to care about.

And my concern is that by default the TDP limit will most probably be imposed for default clocked cards so OCed cards will probably exceed that limit and to make things worse, they will exceed that limit and get underclocked when the performance would be most needed. I mean when is TDP going to be higher? When the GPU is most used, obviously, so I'm almost sure that unless the TDP limit is automatically adjusted depending on the card in use and the clocks, most people are going to get massive slowdowns, because performance (clocks) will be crippled when GPU power was most needed, which is always when you are getting lowest frames. (lowest frames based on GPU, not lowest frames imposed by the CPU)



HalfAHertz said:


> The TMUs were linked to the ROPs not to the SPs last time I checked, so 96 could very well be true.



No offense, but you didn't check very well or you didn't check since pre DX10 era. Ever since R600 TMUs have been linked to SIMDs


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

entropy13 said:


> You can change settings related to it in the AMD Overdrive section.
> 
> "User controllable via AMD Overdrive Utility."



Missed that. Thanks. I fail.


Benetanegia said:


> Yup. I was going to tell him that.
> 
> The problem is for average users and most probably with factory overclocked cards. How is that going to work? Very few people use Overdrive, at least that I know of. And none of the non-enthusiast friends would ever use it, that's why pre-overclocked cards exist, because most people don't OC themselves or they only do the basic upping the clock slide and see what happens. That's all they want to care about.
> 
> And my concern is that the TDP limit will most probably be imposed for default clocked cards so OCed cards will probably exceed that limit and to make things worse, they will exceed that limit and get underclocked when the performance would be most needed. I mean when is TDP going to be higher? When the GPU is most used, obviously, so I'm almost sure that unless the TDP limit is automatically adjusted depending on the card in use and the clocks, most people are going to get massive slowdowns, because performance (clocks) will be crippled when GPU power was most needed, which is always when you are getting lowest frames. (lowest frames based on GPU, not lowest frames imposed by the CPU)


I think its going to be temp regulated much like the 580. I doubt it will be clocked down if the temp is 30c


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## HalfAHertz (Nov 22, 2010)

The stupid thing here is that if you choose to "opt-out" and disable the limiter, you'll most likely void the card's warranty...


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## mechtech (Nov 22, 2010)

newfellow said:


> Although, threaded AMD promises, but I have to agree this is incredible weak show from AMD.
> 
> Considering AMD/ATI is at huge issues with driver, BIOSes and all software of software issues + the fact that they have delay issues and nothing(as in new games) never seems to work correctly on their GPUs it is pretty funny..
> 
> (and nobody dare to accuse me an 'NVIDIA' fanboy I own only AMD/ATI GPUs atm a lot of them and I've been fixing their drivers for past 6 months almost every day basis.)



Geeee you must have bad luck, I have never had a problem !!  Then again I usually only install the driver and not catalyst control center.


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

HalfAHertz said:


> The stupid thing here is that if you choose to "opt-out" and disable the limiter, you'll most likely void the card's warranty...



Who cares. You do that anyway the second you do any OC.


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## Regeneration (Nov 22, 2010)

Some more slides are *available here*.


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

Regeneration said:


> Some more slides are *available here*.



Ohhhhh you be stealing traffic yo! 

Thanks for the link!


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## BraveSoul (Nov 22, 2010)

so, a dual core gpu eh?    sounds good
_____________________________





Antec1200 filter project


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## KainXS (Nov 22, 2010)

I don't know whats gonna happen, you can't gauge it in normal ways because the 6870 is still using 5 way shaders and this is going to be the new 4 way(from the looks) if the shaders perform worse than the current ones it could only be barely faster, if they perform a good bit better it will be a monster, and thats if they can get similar core clocks to the current 5870 and seeing as that slide s

seems power limiting is the future of this process right now

is the first slide really fake or is one just october and the other is november oh delayed i see.

@bravesoul
the HD5870 was kinda like a dual core gpu.


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## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

So confirmed no 96 TMU. At least no 1920 SP + 96 TMU.

Either 1920 SP + 120 TMU
or 1536 SP + 96 TMU

TBH the above is probably the reason that different sources have claimed 1920 SP or 1536 SP, depending on the number they chose to believe (1920 SP or 96 TMU).


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## Swamp Monster (Nov 22, 2010)

kainxs said:


> or is one just october and the other is november



+1


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

BraveSoul said:


> so, a dual core gpu eh?    sounds good
> _____________________________
> http://stats.free-dc.org/cpidtagb.php?cpid=59693a2ed1d0ab4f24e571d332537dfb&theme=9&cols=1
> Antec1200 filter project



They are all multi core. I learned that a long time ago.


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## HalfAHertz (Nov 22, 2010)

Benetanegia said:


> So confirmed no 96 TMU. At least no 1920 SP + 96 TMU.
> 
> Either 1920 SP + 120 TMU
> or 1536 SP + 96 TMU
> ...



maybe the full die is 1920/120 but because of bad yields, the harvested die is 1536/96. Oor they got their sources mixed and it's 1920/120 for the 6970 and 1536/96 for the 6950



BraveSoul said:


> so, a dual core gpu eh?    sounds good
> _____________________________
> http://stats.free-dc.org/cpidtagb.php?cpid=59693a2ed1d0ab4f24e571d332537dfb&theme=9&cols=1
> Antec1200 filter project


Hey, they're called parallel processors for a reason


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## KainXS (Nov 22, 2010)

"wonders if w1z is cuttled up with a 6970 right now":shadedshu


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## Swamp Monster (Nov 22, 2010)

From The Slide:
Number of color and coverage samples can be independently controlled - That sounds interesting.


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## Over_Lord (Nov 22, 2010)

KainXS said:


> "wonders if w1z is cuttled up with a 6970 right now":shadedshu



I share that feeling bro


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

Swamp Monster said:


> From The Slide:
> Number of color and coverage samples can be independently controlled - That sounds interesting.



For calibration it would be good. Not many people mess with that anyway. Most of that is on the monitor end anyway. To me that just sounds like "filler" for the features.


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## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

HalfAHertz said:


> maybe the full die is 1920/120 but because of bad yields, the harvested die is 1920/120. Oor they got their sources mixed and it's 1920/120 for the 6970 and 1536/96 for the 6950



Probably. I said what I said because 96 SP figure is the only one that never changed in any of the rumors, no matter the "source". Some said 1920/96 others said 1536/96 (I even saw 2048/96), but no one ever mentioned other TMU ammount other than 96, shich is what got me confused. Again, what you say is probable, but not completely sure about that either 6 SIMDs disabled is a lot, it's 20% less. Again bad yields or bad rumors/bad interpretation on our part? Cypress had only 10% disabled on the HD5850, 20% leaves very little room for harvesting based on clocks, unless they don't mind the HD6950 being 40% slower than the HD6970. Seems like a very big gap.


----------



## Swamp Monster (Nov 22, 2010)

TheMailMan78 said:


> To me that just sounds like "filler" for the features.



I like those kind of features, because it should allow to enhance colors on some games - force them to look better (if done right)
.edit. Yes, it can be done on monitor too, but it is a nice feature anyway


----------



## happita (Nov 22, 2010)

TheMailMan78 said:


> Who cares. You do that anyway the second you do any OC.



Isnt that only if you play with voltages? They can't really tell if you OC without upping the voltage.

However, back to the subject at hand. I am a little disappointed about the mem bandwidth, however the other improvements might be enough for the 6970 to compete with the 580. Price will indeed be most people's factor when deciding whether or not to get either flagship card.
For me though, i think i will wait it out till the 7 series with my 5850.


----------



## Yellow&Nerdy? (Nov 22, 2010)

Although the performance numbers seem to be a bummer, it can still be a great card. If it is 5-10% slower than the 580 but costs 300-350 bucks with better power consumption, it would be great. 3 more weeks of waiting, then we can put all these speculations to rest.


----------



## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

Swamp Monster said:


> I like those kind of features, because it should allow to enhance colors on some games - force them to look better (if done right)
> .edit. Yes, it can be done on monitor too, but it is a nice feature anyway



It's not what you think guys. Those are just related to Antialiasing. let's see if I get it explained well. What they call Color samples are samples which are completely calculated, with all the color info + shaders + stencil/z, and coverage samples are samples whose purpose is to determine how much of the pixel belongs to which color. 

i.e with normal 4xMSAA where color and coverage sample number is the same (4 color&4coverage) if a pixel is between 2 different objects (let's say one is black and the other is white) and 2 out of 4 samples fall in the area that belongs to black object the final pixel will be "50% black", if only one falls in the black object "25% black" and so on. 

The problem is that it is posible that the black object occupies 40%+ of the "pixel area" while only one color sample (25%) actually falls within it, so the resulting color (25% black) is not accurate, here is where a higher number of coverage samples come to the rescue. this samples only take care of aproximating how much of the area belongs to object 1 and how much to object 2. Summarizing: color samples determine how many colors/objects are there to choose from and coverage samples determine how much of those colors are mixed up on the final result.

Nvidia has been doing this with the CSAA mode for ages although with fixed color/coverage relations and I think Ati's CFAA mode is the same. Now they are making posible to choose how many of each one developers want to use. A nice addition but honestly, not something that will improve quality a lot and I don't even think many developers will bother programming their own "mix".


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## Swamp Monster (Nov 22, 2010)

To Benetanegia:
I know it's related to Antialiasing. I just think that if i will be able to put "color sample slider" to the Max (or mix them in trial and error way), then it would improve color accuracy of game.
From what you are saying I guess that it's more complicated than that.
Thanx for explanation.


----------



## pantherx12 (Nov 22, 2010)

So many stream processors!

I want ! lol


----------



## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

LAN_deRf_HA said:


> So the memory is only 5000 effective? Thought they we're confirmed as using chips rated for 6000.


I have mentioned in the past that true high-speed GDDR5, if put on theese cards, would delay them. You should not be surprised, as highspeed GDDR5 just went into production at the end of september...



Benetanegia said:


> 96 TMU cannot be correct. You can't divide 96 TMU on 30 SIMDs. 96/30 = 3.2
> 
> On top of that the TMU number per SIMD is always a power of 2 and has always been 4 so far on AMD cards. 30 SIMDs most probably means 120 TMUs.
> 
> Only other posibility is that Cayman is still 5D and has 24 SIMDs. 1920/80 = 24. Then all the numbers provided here match up. (24 x 4 = 96 TMU)



All outlier indicators say 4-D. Hence 2x the polygon power...



poo417 said:


> The memory bottleneck was a myth on the 5xxx series.  You could over clock the memory on my old 5970 from 1000 - 1200 and gain a few percent performance.  Overclocking the GPU on the other hand form 725 - 900 was a HUGE jump in performance.  The problem with the cards was a lack of memory on very res with AA.  At 6050 x 1080 AA with a lot of games was not possible.
> 
> My 480's regularly use more than 1 GB in games at that res.  Hell there is even a few games that use more than 1 GB at 1920 x 1080 with 4/8 x AA.
> 
> Overclocking the memory on the 480's does very little as well.  Again OC the GPU massive jump in performance in most games.


 All talk about memory bottleneck, at the source, had nothing to do with THAT sort of performance. There is a very specific memory bottleneck when running Eyefinity, but noone has really tested that and submitted public data. It is NOT myth...it just wasn't tested properly. Go figure...that's what happens when you rely on the numbers amatures put up to justify thier own thoughts.



bear jesus said:


> Yes but didn't have a clue what relevance it had, are the 68xx cards 1 per clock like the last gen as well?
> 
> Is it kind of like doubling the ipc for a cpu or something? I'm kind of curious what effect  on performance it will have.


 remember back to when I said for sure that Barts was 5-d, for exactly the reasoning that if barts was 4D, it should have double the performance that was indicated back then. Seems to make sense now, no? More details will come with time, but I'd be wary of the data until it's all official, at this point. Again, we've got some faked slides.



Yellow&Nerdy? said:


> Although the performance numbers seem to be a bummer, it can still be a great card. If it is 5-10% slower than the 580 but costs 300-350 bucks with better power consumption, it would be great. 3 more weeks of waiting, then we can put all these speculations to rest.



I think you are execting too much. Cayman @ <$400 would be silly, IMHO. these are high-performance cards, where all manufacturer's have the greatest markup. It's more like that's what AMD would charge retailers...and you KNOW the retailers are gonna gouge us hard, especially given the timing of teh relase..there is not going to be many cards available for christmas presents, for sure. I expect a sell-out, and there won't be more cards again until after the new year.


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## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> All outlier indicators say 4-D. Hence 2x the polygon power...



First of all, I think you quoted the wrong post.

Anyway my reaction:

 Ein? Explain please. What is the relation between the shaders and the polygon power? Theorethical/peak polygon power is twice because Cayman has twice as many vertex/raster engines when compared to previous gen. What does shader config have to do with that?


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## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

Benetanegia said:


> First of all, I think you quoted the wrong post.
> 
> Anyway my reaction:
> 
> Ein? Explain please. What is the relation between the shaders and the polygon power? Theorethical/peak polygon power is twice because Cayman has twice as many vertex/raster engines when compared to previous gen. What does shader config have to do with that?



Without the added shader power to actually use the polygon power...need I say more? You're a smart guy, fill in the blanks! 

And no, I didn't quote the wrong post.  Make of it what you will.


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## N3M3515 (Nov 22, 2010)

Benetanegia said:


> 20% leaves very little room for harvesting based on clocks, unless they don't mind the HD6950 being 40% slower than the HD6970. Seems like a very big gap.



HD 6850 has 20% less shaders than HD 6870 and it's not 40% slower. Care to explain?


----------



## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> Wihtout the added shader power to actually use the polygon power...need I say more?



And how is the 4D affecting that at all?

Anyway, my post was about the fact that on Evergreen the theoretical/peak polygon power was not used at all. Real power is much much much lower. Remember that at 1 poly/clock a HD5870 should do 850 million poly/s or ~15 million poly per frame @60fps. The thing is that it does not do that at all, and even AMD was asking for 16 pixel/poly in order to be optimiced. That accounts for less than 0.5 million poly frames, way too far from the peak 15 millions, that's like <5% efficiency. If shaders where the problem they would have not inproved the setup engine, there's a lot of room to increase the efficiency from that 5% all they way up to 99% and looking at the slides it's obvious that Cayman has exactly 2x as much power. We are not talking about a bottleneck on the shaders there, it's a very real 2x improvement based on a very specific 2x increase in the setup engine.



N3M3515 said:


> HD 6850 has 20% less shaders than HD 6870 and it's not 40% slower. Care to explain?



It has 14% less shaders, but yeah it's a good point and maybe I exagerated a bit, although the reason I mistakenly exagerated is because I was assuming almost perfect efficiency. To answer your question, the explanation of why that happens is easy. AMD's architecture is not efficient, it's far from being efficient from a utilization POV. Basically it's not the HD6850 which is faster than "it should", it's HD6870 which is not as fast as it should, because it cannot use all it's resources as well as the HD6850. And this is even more true for the HD5870 that with 1600SP "should be" 2x as fast as the HD4890, but it isn't.

It was just a comment anyway and mostly based on the fact that I don't think that 6 SIMDs are needed to be disabled on the first harvested part in order to have good yields. Unless they're horrible horrible horrible. It means they would be getting almost 6 errors per die or like 500 per waffer... come on... no way (or does it?).


----------



## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

Yes, yes, but they are also at the limits of the process, so any additions to the gpu design really have to have a justifiable benefit. There's no point in a huge set-up array if you can never skin your polygons in time...a set-up engine sitting idle is REALLY stupid.


5870 doesn't fit in this example, except to show how misbalancing gpu arrangement can lead to real big problems...and the 6870 and it's higher efficiency serves as the basis. The 5870 set-up engine wasn't even good enough to fill 5870 properly...much of the gpu is idle all the time, even in 3D.

But, why was it idle so much? Becuase only one-to-three SPs of the 5 in a grouping ever gets used.

This inefficiency is what precludes the switch to 4-D. But at the same time, scheduling for 5-D shaders is far different from 4D, with higher-order math capabilities...

How does the set-up engine affect 4D? Are you serious? What feeds the shaders? Fairy dust and troll hairs?


----------



## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> Yes, yes, but they are also at the limits of the process, so any additions to the gpu design really have to have a justifiable benefit. There's no point in a huge set-up array if you can never skin your polygons in time...a set-up engine sitting idle is REALLY stupid.
> 
> 
> 5870 doesn't fit in this example, except to show how misbalancing gpu arrangement can lead to real big problems...and the 6870 and it's higher efficiency serves as the basis. The 5870 set-up engine wasn't even good enough to fill 5870 properly...much of the gpu is idle all the time, even in 3D.
> ...



Don't forget the pixie semen.


----------



## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> How does the set-up engine affect 4D? Are you serious? What feeds the shaders? Fairy dust and troll hairs?



NO. How does set-up affect 4D no (as in the dispatcher), I know that, I'm no nub. How does 4D affect the set-up (as in making the vertex/raster engine more efficient). Repeating my prvious post, the vertex engine was not even used to a 5% of it's capabilities. Ok, let me rephrase it: it was not even used to a 5% of it's *allegued* capabilities. So why add another one?


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## N3M3515 (Nov 22, 2010)

Benetanegia said:


> It has 14% less shaders, but yeah it's a good point and maybe I exagerated a bit, although the reason I mistakenly exagerated is because I was assuming almost perfect efficiency. To answer your question, the explanation of why that happens is easy. AMD's architecture is not efficient, it's far from being efficient from a utilization POV. Basically it's not the HD6850 which is faster than "it should", it's HD6870 which is not as fast as it should, because it cannot use all it's resources as well as the HD6850. And this is even more true for the HD5870 that with 1600SP "should be" 2x as fast as the HD4890, but it isn't



In order to be 2x faster than HD4890, doesn't it must have 2x everything?
2x850Mhz
2x4800Mhz
2x800 shaders
2xtmus
2xrops

??


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## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

N3M3515 said:


> In order to be 2x faster than HD4890, doesn't it must have 2x everything?
> 2x850Mhz
> 2x4800Mhz
> 2x800 shaders
> ...



Short answer. No.

Especially it doesn't need 2x850Mhz if it has 2xthe shaders. As long as it has 2x the Gflops (shaders x mhz x 2) it "should" be twice as fast. It all depends on the architecture tho. Fermi is like that, twice the flops, exactly twice the performance. It also usually means 2x the die area. With AMD 2x shaders does not equal 2x the performance, but usually they have also managed to not double up the die area.

AMD= efficient at manufacturing time
Nvidia= efficient at execution time


----------



## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

Benetanegia said:


> NO. How does set-up affect 4D no (as in the dispatcher). How does 4D affect the set-up (as in making the vertex/raster engine more efficient). Repeating my prvious post, the vertex engine was not even used to a 5% of it's capabilities. Ok, let me rephrase it: it was not even used to a 5% of it's *allegued* capabilities. So why add another one?



Let me put this very simply. Barts has "2" setup engines(more like one dual-issue, but whatever). Together, they process 1 polygon per clock.

Cayman is MORE than twice the theoretical math power of Barts, due to the 4-D switch.

How is the set-up engine that can barely feed Barts work on Cayman? Does it not have to have twice the output as the Barts set-up, in order to be able to feed Cayman?

Of course the previous incarnation sucked! Explain why they were unable to fully utilize vertex setup, and you have your answer? It's all very obvious!


----------



## N3M3515 (Nov 22, 2010)

Benetanegia said:


> Short answer. No.
> 
> Especially it doesn't need 2x850Mhz if it has 2xthe shaders. As long as it has 2x the Gflops (shaders x mhz x 2) it "should" be twice as fast. It all depends on the architecture tho. Fermi is like that, twice the flops, exactly twice the performance. It also usually means 2x the die area. With AMD 2x shaders does not equal 2x the performance, but usually they have also managed to not double up the die area.
> 
> ...



And what about 2x memory speed?


----------



## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> Let me put this very simply. Barts has "2" setup engines(more like one dual-issue, but whatever). Together, they process 1 polygon per clock.
> 
> Cayman is MORE than twice the theoretical math power of Barts, due to the 4-D switch.
> 
> ...



But like I said, it must be the rasterizer which was the bottleneck not the vertex engine per se. What they have doubled is afaik, from what I can read on the slides the vertex engine only. maybe I always understood this wrong but Cypress and Barts both have two rasterizers too and even then the bottleneck was there. It had to be there or on the dispatch unit. But in either case it doesn't matter, because neither have been increased (maybe improved). And again to my point: it's something else that was preventing the vertex engine from achieving it's peak of 15 mllion per frame, so why on earth it was only this unit that got doubled? It's that What I cannot understand. Maybe the diagrams on Cypress/Barts were misleading and did not have 2 rasterizer/dispatch units? I just don't understand it looking at the diagrams.



N3M3515 said:


> And what about 2x memory speed?



Not required either. If the memory was holding down the performance, overclocking the memory would have increased the perforance linearly or almost linearly and that never happened. In fact it was far from it.


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## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

NO diagrams in existence are 100% factual representations of a gpu's design. They merely serve as FLOWCHARTS depicting how data will flow through the gpu, but do not denote actual functionality.

But, what the kicker here is that although Barts is far more efficient that Cypress, this efficiency increase is almost 100% in the setup engine. In fact, we all know that this is really the only change from Cypress to Barts...besides memory control.

So, the tidbit if info you may be missing is that although Barts is 1120 shaders, AMD also had a design with 1280 shaders(another two SIMD clusters), but limitation in the set-up engine limited the performance increase to just 2%...2%, from a 12.5% increase in math power!

Also of note is that Bart's memory controller is 50% of the functionality of Cypress(literally takes up hallf the die space), and this led to the reduction of memory speeds in the Barts chips(the smaller controller cannot maitain high speeds very well)....but even so, performance is barely impacted...unless you run high resolutions(and hence Barts being the new "mainstream"). So while the lack of 7Gbps memory may concern some, it should only really affect a small part of the marketplace.


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

Um guys.....

 Cayman Confirmed To Be Using VLIW4 SP Arrangement...


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## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

Yeah, this is nothing new to ME, personally. I'm trying to explain to Bene that the 4D shader arrangement is what required the higher polygon output, but he doesn't seem to understand why(although, i must say, I do understand where he is coming from).


----------



## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> Yeah, this is nothing new to ME, personally.



Well some of us are not as 133t as you. 

Don't you have a tweaker to design?


----------



## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

TheMailMan78 said:


> Well some of us are not as 133t as you.
> 
> Don't you have a tweaker to design?



It's not like this is magic pixie dust, there is very logical steps to this progression in gpu design, and even more so now that they are confined within the limits of the process.

You want another chip like TWKR, tell JF_AMD to give me a job. Seems AMD might need some new blood in marketing anyway.


----------



## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> NO diagrams in existence are 100% factual representations of a gpu's design. They merely serve as FLOWCHARTS depicting how data will flow through the gpu, but do not denote actual functionality.



Fair enough.



> But, what the kicker here is that although Barts is far more efficient that Cypress, this efficiency increase is almost 100% in the setup engine. In fact, we all know that this is really the only change from Cypress to Barts...besides memory control.



Kinda. I atribute it to the fact that Barts has a comparable setup engine to Cypress but far less shaders to feed. If this is what you refer to a efficiency increase on the setup engine then we agree. I don't think there was any other improvement on the "classic" setup engine. There were those improvements to the registers between the setup and the tesselator tho ("non-classic" setup engine he ), but I don't remember reading anything else.

EDIT: And I think that the answer to my question is precisely in those buffers on the set-up output. After reading the scarce info on those buffers in Techreport and Anandtech, it looks like they are just a few series of FIFO registers and that's probaby the info I was missing. The vertex/raster engine can generate many polys a second, but has apparently not enough place to store them until other units finish their work on previous ones. Hence it stays stalled for long periods of time. Doubling the engine doubled the buffers and with them the performance. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but it IS something I thought was different and could explain why. For the record, previously I thought the buffer between setup and the rest of the chip was an actual cache, biderectional to be more precise.



> So, the tidbit if info you may be missing is that although Barts is 1120 shaders, AMD also had a design with 1280 shaders(another two SIMD clusters), but limitation in the set-up engine limited the performance increase to just 2%...2%, from a 12.5% increase in math power!



It was also 128 bit and 16 ROPs, that's where the limitation was most probaby, not the setup engine. Based on the relation of performance per clock between HD6870 vs HD5850 vs HD5870 I would say that the set-up limit was somewhere between 1120 and 1440 SPs. Probably closer to 1440, because the HD5850 is significantly faster than HD6870 whn @900 Mhz.


----------



## DailymotionGamer (Nov 22, 2010)

thunderising said:


> 160GBPS that's it??? WHAT SHIT GTX580 is near 200GBPS


Maybe i am looking at something else, but i see 300gb of bandwidth


----------



## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

Benetanegia said:


> It was also 128 bit and 16 ROPs, that's where the limitation was most probaby, not the setup engine. Based on the relation of performance per clock between HD6870 vs HD5850 vs HD5870 I would say that the set-up limit was somewhere between 1120 and 1440 SPs. Probably closer to 1440, because the HD5850 is significantly faster than HD6870 whn @900 Mhz.



AMD would be the source of info claiming it's the set-up engine that limited Barts with 1280SPs vs 1120, so the breakpoint is 1120 for Barts' set-up engine, clear as day(as they cannot add just one SIMD to barts' dual-engine). What remains to be seen is if they have simply doubled up the Barts setup engine, or if it's a completle redesign, but I doubt they'd venture too far away from Barts...at least in overall implementation.

You could be right in it the limit being cache, but also maybe an increase in set-up registers also allows for doubling of polygons per clock. In fact, I trust AMD wouldn't have added anything they did not need, purely based onthem being so limited by the process...Cayman is a HUGE-ASS chip.


----------



## Swamp Monster (Nov 22, 2010)

u2konline said:


> Maybe i am looking at something else, but i see 300gb of bandwidth



160Gbps is for single GPU card, but 307GBps is for dual GPU card.


----------



## Benetanegia (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> AMD would be the source of info claiming it's the set-up engine that limited Barts with 1280SPs vs 1120, so the breakpoint is 1120 for Barts' set-up engine, clear as day(as they cannot add just one SIMD to barts' dual-engine).



idk maybe you are right. My only source on that is Anandtech review where they said:



> However it’s worth noting that internally AMD was throwing around 2 designs for Barts: a 16 SIMD (1280 SP) 16 ROP design, and a 14 SIMD (1120 SP) 32 ROP design that they ultimately went with. The 14/32 design was faster, but only by 2%. This along with the ease of porting the design from Cypress made it the right choice for AMD, but it also means that Cypress/Barts is not exclusively bound on the shader/texture side or the ROP/raster side.



The rest is mostly assumption on my part. i.e HD5830 is definately bottlenecked by 16 ROPs, hence a Barts with 16 ROPs and more SPs than HD5830 would definately be bottlenecked. IMO I don't even know why AMD tried that one internally tbh.



> You could be right in it the limit being cache, but also maybe an increase in set-up registers also allows for doubling of polygons per clock. In fact, I trust AMD wouldn't have added anything they did not need, purely based onthem being so limited by the process...Cayman is a HUGE-ASS chip.



Yeah. All my confussion came from the fact that the architecture is far more "set in stone" than I thought. I just thought that since Cypress/Barts had two rasterizers and only one setup engine, it was also posible to have 2 tesselators and one engine without the engine (or anything in between) becoming a bottleneck, but not necessarily, because the architecture might not permit it, after all. That was my only concern, and it was also stupid on my part that I was always repeating on my head "but why would they have a vertex engine capable of 850 million just to have it unused all the time". I was stuck on that tbh, when the question is "why not", in the end it's only one poly per clock, you can't (don't need to) go lower than that.


----------



## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> It's not like this is magic pixie dust, there is very logical steps to this progression in gpu design, and even more so now that they are confined within the limits of the process.
> 
> You want another chip like TWKR, tell JF_AMD to give me a job. Seems AMD might need some new blood in marketing anyway.



I only want a TWKR chip if it was signed by you.


----------



## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

TheMailMan78 said:


> I only want a TWKR chip if it was signed by you.



Get one to my door, and I'll gladly sign it and return it to you.






:shadedshu


----------



## pantherx12 (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> AMD would be the source of info claiming it's the set-up engine that limited Barts with 1280SPs vs 1120, so the breakpoint is 1120 for Barts' set-up engine, clear as day(as they cannot add just one SIMD to barts' dual-engine). What remains to be seen is if they have simply doubled up the Barts setup engine, or if it's a completle redesign, but I doubt they'd venture too far away from Barts...at least in overall implementation.
> 
> You could be right in it the limit being cache, but also maybe an increase in set-up registers also allows for doubling of polygons per clock. In fact, I trust AMD wouldn't have added anything they did not need, purely based onthem being so limited by the process...Cayman is a HUGE-ASS chip.



What like a non chopped up 6850? ( I only say this because of 960 being half of 1920 lol)


*edit* actually looking at the crossfire review, even has the performance powercolor hinted too. 20-50% better than 5870 ( depending on resolution and game of course)


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## cadaveca (Nov 22, 2010)

pantherx12 said:


> What like a non chopped up 6850? ( I only say this because of 960 being half of 1920 lol)
> 
> 
> *edit* actually looking at the crossfire review, even has the performance powercolor hinted too. 20-50% better than 5870 ( depending on resolution and game of course)



The only thing is that 6850 is 5-D, and Cayman is 4-D, so there isn't really any way we can make a guess at performance...it's just far too different from the past tech...This is the first break-away from the R600 design. 

The potential is there for Cayman to do far more than just +50% of Cypress...it truly depends on how many of those shaders they can keep fed all the time. 5870 is rarely more than 60% loaded, even when it indicates that gpu laod is 100%...you can tell this by power consumption.


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## pantherx12 (Nov 22, 2010)

cadaveca said:


> The only thing is that 6850 is 5-D, and Cayman is 4-D, so there isn't really any way we can make a guess at performance...it's just far too different from the past tech...This is the first break-away from the R600 design.



Maybe they've found a neat way of melting them together using the 5th shader as solder 

And yeah I know what you mean about guessing, if it was just up-scaled barts with the power to feed the shader it's simply the thing I was being silly about earlier  (or 70% improvement over 6870 if it scaled nicely, which thus far the 5d architecture has not as far as I'm aware )

It has to scale over 5870 by 60% in order to beat 580 in everything and 50% to win more then loose but not a straight up win .

This is one of the more interesting new gpu times IMO 


Sorry for rambly post. I ramble when posting : ]


Assuming all shaders are fed 100% etc, can we work anything out from that? Like what it's optimal theoretical performance could be?


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## char[] rager (Nov 22, 2010)

The 4870x2 has around 2.5 TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance. Am I right?

So if the 6970 has around 3 TFLOPS of single-precision compute performance, it should be faster than the 4870x2?


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## KainXS (Nov 22, 2010)

the 5870 is basically the same performance of a 4870x2


?????

why would the 6970 be slower?


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## TheMailMan78 (Nov 22, 2010)

KainXS said:


> the 5870 is basically the same performance of a 4870x2
> 
> 
> ?????



Pretty much man. If the 6970 isnt the same speed as two 5870 in crossfire then it will be fail.


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## Sapientwolf (Nov 23, 2010)

TheMailMan78 said:


> Pretty much man. If the 6970 isnt the same speed as two 5870 in crossfire then it will be fail.



That's an awful lot to ask for considering there wasn't a change to a smaller fabrication process.  It's not gonna happen.


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## WarEagleAU (Nov 23, 2010)

wow 30w at idle is incredible....if you ain't gaming or watching a movie, that is awesome.


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## bear jesus (Nov 23, 2010)

WarEagleAU said:


> wow 30w at idle is incredible....if you ain't gaming or watching a movie, that is awesome.



I agree, i love the lower power draw of newer cards as for one going from the 4870 to 6870 has saved me about $5 a week/about $260 a year in power usage, i know its not exactly a lot but in a little over a years usage the saving would have paid for a 6870 and to me that is awesome.... yes i know I'm tightwad


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## BorgOvermind (Nov 23, 2010)

VLIW4 (4D) arrangement with 1900+ shaders would have a performance of +60% compared to 5870. That, along the 2-3x tesselation performance would certainly prevail.


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## N3M3515 (Nov 23, 2010)

BorgOvermind said:


> VLIW4 (4D) arrangement with 1900+ shaders would have a performance of +60% compared to 5870. That, along the 2-3x tesselation performance would certainly prevail.



It would be marvelous!, but i think a more realistic guess would be 40% on average faster than HD5870

And if the leak is to be believed, antilles will be a dual underclocked HD 6970, so if nv dual gpu card isn't dual underclocked GTX 580, nvidia won't be able to match amd's dual gpu.


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## bear jesus (Nov 23, 2010)

BorgOvermind said:


> VLIW4 (4D) arrangement with 1900+ shaders would have a performance of +60% compared to 5870. That, along the 2-3x tesselation performance would certainly prevail.





N3M3515 said:


> It would be marvelous!, but i think a more realistic guess would be 40% on average faster than HD5870
> 
> And if the leak is to be believed, antilles will be a dual underclocked HD 6970, so if nv dual gpu card isn't dual underclocked GTX 580, nvidia won't be able to match amd's dual gpu.



I just wish it could be 50% faster than the 580 just because of this “If the 6970 is 50% faster then the 580GTX I'll tea bag a donkeys nuts during the Super Bowl half time show.” -TheMailMan78 

But seriously all i hope for is around the power of 6870 crossfire and have 2gb of memory as standard so i won't mind selling my 6870's to get myself back to using a single card and still game at 5040x1050 with maxed settings.


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## pantherx12 (Nov 23, 2010)

Sapientwolf said:


> That's an awful lot to ask for considering there wasn't a change to a smaller fabrication process.  It's not gonna happen.



Remember two 5870s don't scale 100% together, it's actually possible.


Not likely mind you


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## wahdangun (Nov 23, 2010)

wow, just bring it asap AMD


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## bear jesus (Nov 23, 2010)

pantherx12 said:


> Remember two 5870s don't scale 100% together, it's actually possible.
> 
> 
> Not likely mind you



I'm still hoping for about the power of 6870 crossfire and mainly as you said things don't scale 100%.... even if the 6870's do in some games that's beside the point 



wahdangun said:


> wow, just bring it asap AMD



 I agree, the only thing keeping me so relaxed about the delay is the fact I'm still enjoying my pair of 6870's  hopefully that should mean I'm not going to have to order on launch day as if i had waited a week or two i could have saved £45, yes i know not much but I'm cheap


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## pantherx12 (Nov 23, 2010)

I'm expecting 6850 crossfire performance + what ever the new 4d arrangement brings to the table.

Which should be better minimum frames ( so higher average perhaps too) and since it's roughly dame performance per die area they can use the saved space for extra bits improving things just that bit more.

So 6870 crossfire performance would be around the performance after that thought process lol

waste o post.


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## bear jesus (Nov 23, 2010)

pantherx12 said:


> I'm expecting 6850 crossfire performance + what ever the new 4d arrangement brings to the table.
> 
> Which should be better minimum frames ( so higher average perhaps too) and since it's roughly dame performance per die area they can use the saved space for extra bits improving things just that bit more.
> 
> ...



 not a waste, that post gave me more hope that I'm not just dreaming as i really don't want to lose any power by going from a pair of 6870's to a 6970 but one major thing is even if i got lower max fps he min would be higher thus the average should be as well as some of the momentary fps drops can be crazy low in some games, all the way down to 0fps 

I'm really hoping that getting a 2gb 6970 will be a worth while upgrade from a pair of 6870's even if its just for higher min fps, no crossfire issues (not that i have really notice any apart from trouble overvolting with certain programs), the fact that a single card won't be held back so much by my cpu compared to two cards and the hope that 2gb of memory will help when running games maxed at 5040x1050.

I have to ask though why is your rig listed as dead along with everything it's made up from?


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## pantherx12 (Nov 23, 2010)

Oh because I was upset with most of it being dead lol

CPU was fine, ram was fine.

PSU, two graphics cards and the mobo are dead though : [


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## bear jesus (Nov 23, 2010)

pantherx12 said:


> Oh because I was upset with most of it being dead lol
> 
> CPU was fine, ram was fine.
> 
> PSU, two graphics cards and the mobo are dead though : [



 my condolences for your loss.

But you know it's a great excuse to upgrade  that is the only thing that does not bother me about hardware failing on me although it really sucks if it happens at a time when you either have no money to upgrade or at a time when next generation hardware is about to come out but you still have to wait weeks or months even for it to appear at retail.

Do you have any plans for replacement items... maybe a 6970?


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## HTC (Nov 23, 2010)

pantherx12 said:


> Oh because I was upset with most of it being dead lol
> 
> CPU was fine, ram was fine.
> 
> PSU, two graphics cards and the mobo are dead though : [



Sucks 

Looks like you'll be needing 2 new graphic cards ...



bear jesus said:


> my condolences for your loss.
> 
> But you know it's a great excuse to upgrade  that is the only thing that does not bother me about hardware failing on me although it really sucks if it happens at a time when you either have no money to upgrade or at a time when next generation hardware is about to come out but you still have to wait weeks or months even for it to appear at retail.
> 
> *Do you have any plans for replacement items... maybe a 6970? *



My information network tells me you'll have a couple of 6870 cards for sale soon: i *think* i may have found you a customer ...


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## bear jesus (Nov 23, 2010)

HTC said:


> Sucks
> 
> Looks like you'll be needing 2 new graphic cards ...
> 
> ...



Unfortunately one has already been promised to a friend who is using an on board intel gpu, i can't let him suffer like that  plus he wants the one that i cut a chunk off the cooling plate to attach a vf1000 and also got pencil volt modded for a while so i don't mind giving him a friend only price as it's kind of damaged  only the one i did not mess with will be available to whoever will take it.

I'm betting panther will be wanting a 580 or 6970 though  any thoughts on that yet panther?


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## HTC (Nov 23, 2010)

bear jesus said:


> *Unfortunately one has already been promised to a friend* who is using an on board intel gpu, i can't let him suffer like that  plus he wants the one that i cut a chunk off the cooling plate to attach a vf1000 and also got pencil volt modded for a while so i don't mind giving him a friend only price as it's kind of damaged  only the one i did not mess with will be available to whoever will take it.
> 
> I'm betting panther will be wanting a 580 or 6970 though  any thoughts on that yet panther?



You mean to tell me my information network 1.8.5 is wrong? *Impossible!!!* I knew i should have upgraded to information network 2.0.3 beta ...

Getting back on topic, these new developments seem interesting: really looking forward to seeing some benches. I just hope whoever wins doesn't do so by a big margin so that we can have our treasured price wars


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## bear jesus (Nov 23, 2010)

HTC said:


> You mean to tell me my information network 1.8.5 is wrong? *Impossible!!!* I knew i should have upgraded to information network 2.0.3 beta ...
> 
> Getting back on topic, these new developments seem interesting: really looking forward to seeing some benches. I just hope whoever wins doesn't do so by a big margin so that we can have our treasured price wars





But bk on topic i agree, i would love for the 6970 to be about the power of a 580 and even more so for the 6990 to be about the same as the 595 (i think that's what the dual gf110 card is being referred to as) as then it would be perfect for some great price drops, the recent price drops by nvidia to go against the 68xx cards is a perfect example of how far things can drop, if it was not for the power usage i would have got 2 470's for the same price as 2 6870's instead but to do that i would have wanted to get a better psu as i would have to overclock them


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## BorgOvermind (Nov 23, 2010)

I've re-done some calculations. I'm not gonna get anyone bored with them, but judging by the software shader usage (in)efficiency on the 5k series and the available data regarding 6970, the minimum worst case scenario performance improvement of the 6970 compared to 5870 would be 43%, with an estimated 53% real-world increase (based on how the 68x0 act right now). So if clocks and other things are also tweaked towards better, we could really see above 60%.


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## HalfAHertz (Nov 23, 2010)

BorgOvermind said:


> I've re-done some calculations. I'm not gonna get anyone bored with them, but judging by the software shader usage (in)efficiency on the 5k series and the available data regarding 6970, the minimum worst case scenario performance improvement of the 6970 compared to 5870 would be 43%, with an estimated 53% real-world increase (based on how the 68x0 act right now). So if clocks and other things are also tweaked towards better, we could really see above 60%.



60% above what exactly? Anyway this is not what amd is aiming for. In the best case scenario it would deliver performance on par or slightly greater than the 580.
It is much more financially viable if you have a much more powerful component than your opponent to tweak it down, make it just fast enough but cheaper to produce, so that you can maximize profit margins. If it has potential to be 60% faster than the 5870 (15-20% faster than the 580 i am guessing), while consuming the same power and releasing the same heat as the GTX, AMD would instead underclock/volt it, to increase harvest rates, slim down the cooler and circuitry to decrease costs and make it only 5% faster. After all they are just a business...and as we all know they are after the monies and not after the e-peen

These are just my 2c about your "calculations"  coz my calculatunZ™ show just the opposite, that the 6970 will be just under the 580


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## entropy13 (Nov 23, 2010)

HalfAHertz said:


> 60% above what exactly? Anyway this is not what amd is aiming for. In the best case scenario it would deliver performance on par or slightly greater than the 580.
> It is much more financially viable if you have a much more powerful component than your opponent to tweak it down, make it just fast enough but cheaper to produce, so that you can maximize profit margins. If it has potential to be 60% faster than the 5870 (15-20% faster than the 580 i am guessing), while consuming the same power and releasing the same heat as the GTX, AMD would instead underclock/volt it, to increase harvest rates, slim down the cooler and circuitry to decrease costs and make it only 5% faster. After all they are just a business...and as we all know they are after the monies and not after the e-peen
> 
> These are just my 2c about your "calculations"  coz my calculatunZ™ show just the opposite, that the 6970 will be just under the 580



He meant above 60%, "greater than 60%", not "60% greater than X"


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## N3M3515 (Nov 23, 2010)

HalfAHertz said:


> 60% above what exactly? Anyway this is not what amd is aiming for. In the best case scenario it would deliver performance on par or slightly greater than the 580.
> It is much more financially viable if you have a much more powerful component than your opponent to tweak it down, make it just fast enough but cheaper to produce, so that you can maximize profit margins. If it has potential to be 60% faster than the 5870 (15-20% faster than the 580 i am guessing), while consuming the same power and releasing the same heat as the GTX, AMD would instead underclock/volt it, to increase harvest rates, slim down the cooler and circuitry to decrease costs and make it only 5% faster. After all they are just a business...and as we all know they are after the monies and not after the e-peen
> 
> These are just my 2c about your "calculations"  coz my calculatunZ™ show just the opposite, that the 6970 will be just under the 580



His calculations seem logical, because 1920 shaders are 2x 6850 and 2x 6850 is faster than gtx 580, BUT it not only stops there, you also have the new 4d arrangement, it's single gpu so no problems with drivers, also improved tessellation. if it isn't at least equal to gtx 580 something must be wrong with the leaks.


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## bear jesus (Nov 23, 2010)

N3M3515 said:


> His calculations seem logical, because 1920 shaders are 2x 6850 and 2x 6850 is faster than gtx 580, BUT it not only stops there, you also have the new 4d arrangement, it's single gpu so no problems with drivers, also improved tessellation. if it isn't at least equal to gtx 580 something must be wrong with the leaks.



The fact that 1920 is double the 6850 never crossed my mind, in theory if doubling it gave double the frame rate then it would be the same as the games/res that scale to 100% but then if the architecture is better it would mean even more than 6850 crossfire.

I can't wait to see what the 6970 can do.


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## Assimilator (Nov 23, 2010)

So where's the 6950?


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## dir_d (Nov 23, 2010)

So 300 TDP based on a software limiting cap for AMD Turbo Core for GPU? Essentially auto overclocking and software capping to 300 TDP to meet ATX standard? Is this what im reading?

If so i think its very cool and innovative, It could work out great for people that are scared to overclock but at the same time it seems to hinder real enthusiasts. Sound expense also, i wonder if they will try to justify this as the reason why its going to be priced above the 580. Im just assuming it will be higher than the 580 because AMD's price have been steadily not being what they used to be.


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## cadaveca (Nov 23, 2010)

I think that they HAD to implement the "GPU TurboCORE"...research issues with silicon vias, and you'll understand why.

It's no coincidence that both AMD and nV are using similar tech here, nV's just doesn't adjust clocks...that we know of.


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## KainXS (Nov 23, 2010)

prays that its decent


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## wahdangun (Nov 24, 2010)

bear jesus said:


> I'm still hoping for about the power of 6870 crossfire and mainly as you said things don't scale 100%.... even if the 6870's do in some games that's beside the point
> 
> 
> 
> I agree, the only thing keeping me so relaxed about the delay is the fact I'm still enjoying my pair of 6870's  hopefully that should mean I'm not going to have to order on launch day as if i had waited a week or two i could have saved £45, yes i know not much but I'm cheap



no...no... and no.... if you want to buy it cheap you *MUST buy it at launch* because if it was like HD 58XX scenario the card will be sold out quickly and we know e-tailer like to jack up the price


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## bear jesus (Nov 24, 2010)

wahdangun said:


> no...no... and no.... if you want to buy it heap you *MUST buy it at launch* because if it was like HD 58XX scenario the card will be sold out quickly and we know e-tailer like to jack up the price



 i guess the 68xx cards dropping in price after launch gave me hope that the same could happen with the 69xx card plus i kind of wanted a nice sized SSD with the money i have saved now and to sell my pair of 6870's and 4870 to hopefully fully cover the cost of a 6970.

I guess the reviews on launch day will be the decider in what i have to do.


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## LAN_deRf_HA (Nov 24, 2010)

It's hard to predict how it will go. My recommendation is if they all start selling out, buy one at launch because the restock will probably be priced jacked. If there's always some in stock then they should stay the same or drop in price.


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## bear jesus (Nov 24, 2010)

I wonder if i should sell one of the 6870's and my old 4870 now so i don't mind buying a 6970 on launch day as i could possibly still afford a SSD before the end of the year as well, although i kind of wanted to get a 240GB OCZ revo drive X2 so it would be pretty tight unless i went for something cheaper. 

I'm going to have to put some more thought into this.


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## BorgOvermind (Nov 24, 2010)

HalfAHertz said:


> 60% above what exactly?


Above the 5870. And that would put it also a little above the 580.


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## pantherx12 (Nov 24, 2010)

bear jesus said:


> I wonder if i should sell one of the 6870's and my old 4870 now so i don't mind buying a 6970 on launch day as i could possibly still afford a SSD before the end of the year as well, although i kind of wanted to get a 240GB OCZ revo drive X2 so it would be pretty tight unless i went for something cheaper.
> 
> I'm going to have to put some more thought into this.



How much for that 4870 dude?

I plan on getting a beast of a rig eventually bear, but it won't be in December, I'm getting like £400 at the start of the month : / not enough for fancy rigs 

Next year though I'ma grab a few bits and bobs : ] ( 6970 or wailt til q2 and get 7000 series and bulldozer)


Looking at an AMD set up ( assuming their still best bang for buck)


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## bear jesus (Nov 24, 2010)

pantherx12 said:


> How much for that 4870 dude?
> 
> I plan on getting a beast of a rig eventually bear, but it won't be in December, I'm getting like £400 at the start of the month : / not enough for fancy rigs
> 
> ...



 umm the 4870 is kinda mutilated as well, i cut the back end of the cooling plate off then drilled some holes all the way through and then a bunch of like indents to increase the surface area to use as a vrm cooler alone and then the zalman vf1000 that has to be with it (stock heatsink was chopped up for other use) it's fans clips were broken when removing it so has to use a fan/s with zip ties to hold it/them on

I'm pretty sure i have kicked it's resale value right in the nuts


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## pantherx12 (Nov 24, 2010)

bear jesus said:


> umm the 4870 is kinda mutilated as well, i cut the back end of the cooling plate off then drilled some holes all the way through and then a bunch of like indents to increase the surface area to use as a vrm cooler alone and then the zalman vf1000 that has to be with it (stock heatsink was chopped up for other use) it's fans clips were broken when removing it so has to use a fan/s with zip ties to hold it/them on
> 
> I'm pretty sure i have kicked it's resale value right in the nuts



If card works dude I care not for dodgy looking, send me a PM with a price if you fancy selling it.

Don't get paid til the 6th though.


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## Steevo (Nov 24, 2010)

I sold mine for $45, it was the sapphire 1GB model, then the guy pulled off one of the ram chips trying to get the sink off it. It didn't have a cooler as it was under water for its life.


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## bear jesus (Nov 25, 2010)

Steevo said:


> I sold mine for $45, it was the sapphire 1GB model, then the guy pulled off one of the ram chips trying to get the sink off it. It didn't have a cooler as it was under water for its life.



 i kinda guessed a little high with my 4870, i really had no idea what value they have any more, I'm sure the 4870 will have it's price revised

With a bit of planning i should easily afford a 6970 and either a normal SSD or even a revodrive x2  before the end of the year but i suppose just the 6970 would keep me happy for now.


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