Monday, March 11th 2013
AMD Radeon HD 7790 "Bonaire" Detailed Some More
AMD appears to have a gaping hole in its product stack, between the ~$110 Radeon HD 7770 and ~$170 Radeon HD 7850 1GB, which needs filling. NVIDIA's ~$150 GeForce GTX 650 Ti appears to be getting cozy in that gap. AMD plans to address this $110~$170 gap not by lowering price of the HD 7850 1GB, but by introducing an entirely new SKU. Since production cost on the 2.8 billion-transistor "Pitcairn" silicon is high, and since the HD 7770 maxes out feature-set of the "Cape Verde" silicon, AMD is left with only one option, to create an entirely new ASIC, which has been codenamed "Bonaire."
According to a Hardware.info report, the first SKU based on this silicon will be named Radeon HD 7790. The chip is said to pack 896 stream processors based on the Graphics CoreNext micro-architecture. It will be equipped to perform roughly 10 percent slower than the Radeon HD 7850, which should make it highly competitive with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, giving AMD room for further price-tweaking. Bonaire could contribute to low production cost probably by a leaner transistor count, a narrower memory bus than Pitcairn (resulting in lower number of memory chips on the card), and allowing for a more cost-effective VRM. The HD 7790 is expected to be launched in April.
Source:
Hardware.info
According to a Hardware.info report, the first SKU based on this silicon will be named Radeon HD 7790. The chip is said to pack 896 stream processors based on the Graphics CoreNext micro-architecture. It will be equipped to perform roughly 10 percent slower than the Radeon HD 7850, which should make it highly competitive with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, giving AMD room for further price-tweaking. Bonaire could contribute to low production cost probably by a leaner transistor count, a narrower memory bus than Pitcairn (resulting in lower number of memory chips on the card), and allowing for a more cost-effective VRM. The HD 7790 is expected to be launched in April.
62 Comments on AMD Radeon HD 7790 "Bonaire" Detailed Some More
A more informative News post with information already provided by the original source leads to a more informed user base.
Maybe its better to have put this in the feedback section.
I still see 128-Bit as sufficient by just spec’n in faster GDDR5, which has come a long way since the 7770 was originally developed at 4500Mhz (effective). Reference 7770 has 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective) more often still, but many GTX650Ti use 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective). I think if AMD will run at 1500Mhz that’s 20% increase which should give them something above to 90Gb/s bandwidth, which I’m sure they’ve tested to deduce it's sufficient and doesn’t bottleneck 1920x resolution. Perhaps look at a GTX660 similar… GK106 with 8% increase in clock and one extra SMX, it has 192-Bit pumping 144 Gb/s or 60% more bandwidth. All that together delivers 35% better performance at 1920x from a GTX650Ti that's running say 1550Mhz. How much is that chip/SMX (25% more computing power running 8% faster), while how much is bandwidth? Hard to know?
While I entirely agree memory "bandwidth" is an important attribute, what I contemplate; does it really expound on game FpS, or in the ability turn up the settings given the changes "Bonaire" has in store? Hard to know, but it not a given... ;)
- 12 Compute units = 768 Sp or 20% (that isn’t enough oomph to get close to a 7850 and should've been what a 7770 release with)
- 13 = 832 Sp or 30% (nice, but odd number computes have yet be in GNC architecture)
- 14 = 896 or 40% more than a 7770, while a >25% in bandwidth would make the sweet-spot. The 7850 has 16 compute units 1024 Sp ~15% more than 896Sp.
Unless "Bonaire" has been juggled at the compute level, like AMD moved to say 72 per compute units each, an idea I don't completely discount. I'm thinking a 896 Shader part clocked at around 1050Mhz; memory chugging 5800mhz effective on 128-Bit.
Could Amd have put more double precision specific shaders in, the open cl benches floating about have me pondering.
Was a custom build using a early case that i fell in love with :)
Yea overall the card is realy good and with it able to exhaust was a big bonues for me, but i do agree the price was to high, i waited a good month or more hopeing for the prices to drop (they didn't realy lol) so i bit the bullet and went for it and im happy with it :)
And Leaked Benchmark...