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7970: Another Disappointment from AMD

flopper said:
Its a card for entusiasts.
the cutting edge.
There be other cards for people who simply isnt the target audience with the world fastest single core card.
Its a reason the 6870/570 and such cards outsell the 580/7970/6990 a lot.
just ask Gibbo ;)
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Our best seller is the 6950 2GB.

For NVIDIA Its GTX 560Ti's followed by 580's, 570's are a bit oddball but can shift in great volume when a good deal is done.
 
Gibbo said:
I agree if they were £299.99 Inc they would indeed sell like hot cakes, but that will never happen whilst demand outweighs supply.
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This, tbh. There are people out there who will pay 50% more for 10% increase in performance. And there are many people out there who don't really pore over benchmarks and do cost-benefit analyses. That creates enough demand for a new gen lot of cards even if they don't live up to our expectations.


Duff-Man said:
One thing has struck me though:
The 28nm process allows (in principle) a relative increase in transistor density of 2.05 times (i.e. +105%), whereas the actual transistor density has increased by 'only' 74%. This is quite out of character from previous generations, which have more closely followed the expected transistor packing density (you can check the numbers on the wikipedia pages).

It will be interesting to see how Kepler fares in this regard. It could be that the more intricate design of GCN requires a somewhat looser transistor arrangement than the VLIW cores. But, if nvidia are also producing a ~70-80% increase in transistor density then it's more likely indicative of issues with the 28nm process. That's not necessarily to say it's down to issues with the manufacturing process at TSMC - it could be more physical problems associated with running high-speed transistors at such small sizes. If this IS the case, then we might not see such large gains from Kepler either.
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That's an interesting observation. Never looked into 7970 die-sizes and transistor counts but I remember having a discussion about tihs on the CPU forums a while back where someone pointed out that AMD cards had higher transistor density. I suspected this was architectural. Transistor count will depend more on architecture than anything else, because some standard cells will have higher transistor density than others, and a radically different architecture (one that is compute heavy) would result in your behavioural modelling/EDA tools emitting very different CMOS circuits in the majority case. e.g. GPUs with heavy internal memory/caches may have a different transistor density from a design that has heavy ALU use.
Anyway, I discussed that with a friend of mine who used to work on GPU arch at NVIDIA in the USA and he said it was probably the leading cause for the disparity.

It is impossible to say, of course, without analysing both the CMOS design and the silicon design for two representative GPUs from both camps (which is impossible in this case, and likely very difficult anyway). But if anything this lack of transistor density in GCN supports that hypothesis because now that AMD has moved to a compute heavy architecture it has lost some ground on the transistor density front. If AMD's current GPUs are less dense than NVIDIAs it may well be because less optimised standard cell libraries - NVIDIA has had longer to work on its compute-heavy architectures through revisions going from 8000 to 2xx and now 4xx/5xx.
 
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iB CoMpL3XiTy said:
Lets say the HD7970 is 10% faster than a GTX580 and costs 12% more its actually very good value if you take into account the performance/price ratio you usually see at the high end market.

People expecting the HD7970 that is faster, more efficient and has some cool features to be the same price as a GTX580 are living in a dream land.
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3GB 7970 (expected) Price - £440
3GB GTX580 Price - £440

Keep in mind that the chip in the 7970 is considerably smaller, AMD will be making good money on it. As long as they keep it pegged to the price of the GTX580, they're on to a winner.
 
My thoughts on pricing which probably marry up with Gibbo -

If you look at the market the competition is a nvidia GTX 580 3GB.

So take the current price of an nvidia GTX 580 3GB add a few tens of pounds for the novelty of it being faster and you arrive at the very likely ATI price for a 7970.

So by my reckoning £480 is about the right ball park. Expect to see £500 if supply is short.

Yes it is more than a 6970 but nvidia is keeping the market price high because of the cost of making the 580. If nvidia drop their prices then expect AMD to respond in kind dropping the 7970 price.

Yeah it hurts us as a consumer but the market follows the competition and they can sell you a 7970 at £500 because it is the fastest single GPU card. FACT. That in itself will sell it.

Prices will drop once keplar appears or nvidia drop 580 prices especially on the 3GB model.

I think nvidia are EOL'ing the 570 so the next keplar card you will see will be the equivalent of the 570.

My thoughts anyway.

If you have a 6970 or 580 3GB a 7970 in the next two months will not give you bang for buck(and is probably not worth upgrading too) but will give you the knowledge you have the fastest single GPU card.
 
magick said:
Why is the 570 an oddball? Curious as i'm thinking of getting one.
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I guess its not mid range, and its not top of the range. Its almost top of the range, or top of the mid-range.:p

Value for money (NV) = 560
Top Sepc (NV) = 580

Who buys the 570? Its a compromise hence more variable sales. Its purely dependant on its price point.
 
OCPete said:
I guess its not mid range, and its not top of the range. Its almost top of the range, or top of the mid-range.:p

Value for money (NV) = 560
Top Sepc (NV) = 580

Who buys the 570? Its a compromise hence more variable sales. Its purely dependant on its price point.
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OK. Is it the best card to go for if the 580 is out of reach price wise?

I've seen the Asus 570 for £240.
 
Gibbo said:
Our best seller is the 6950 2GB.

For NVIDIA Its GTX 560Ti's followed by 580's, 570's are a bit oddball but can shift in great volume when a good deal is done.
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No surprise their.

6950 2GB bang for buck is the highest.

People aren't stupid and that's a good thing to see.

Out of interest gibbo without giving too much away could you give %'s on that?

e.g we sell 70% more 6950's than 560's etc
 
Aurhinius said:
No surprise their.

6950 2GB bang for buck is the highest.

People aren't stupid and that's a good thing to see.

Out of interest gibbo without giving too much away could you give %'s on that?

e.g we sell 70% more 6950's than 560's etc
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Can't go into detail but percentage wise we sell very similar amounts of both AMD/NVIDIA gaming cards. :)
 
Yamahahahahaha said:
3GB 7970 (expected) Price - £440
3GB GTX580 Price - £440

Keep in mind that the chip in the 7970 is considerably smaller, AMD will be making good money on it. As long as they keep it pegged to the price of the GTX580, they're on to a winner.
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I think £440 is slightly optimistic for the HD 7970,though would be good ifit does come in at £440

Would also be nice to see AMD undercut nvidia and start a price war, but they don't need to so unless sales really struggle then I expect the price to be slightly higher than a 3GB GTX580.

Like the HD5850 and HD6950 I'm hoping the HD7950 is the sweet spot for price/performance.
 
I can't say the performance surprised me; i'm disappointed that we're no longer in the days of seeing the next-gen double the performance of the previous one but that's just the way it is.

I mean you only have to look at the core config to see that you're looking at around 30% extra performance:

2048:128:32 vs 1536:96:32 = boosts of 33:33:0% and you get 5% extra core clock and a 50% wider memory bus.

I mean I know it's a tremendously crude way of doing it but there's nothing there to begin to suggest you'll see performance gains in the order of 50% even - probably more like 20-30%. And if you look at TPU's review, they state an average boost of 23% compared to the HD6970.

As for it being a disappointment? Well, no, I don't find it disappointing because I didn't read and believe DM's boring rhetoric but I do find the price hard to swallow.
 
Gibbo said:
Yes its a good card!

As its XMAS our price is now £240, so buy from us. :D
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Have you just dropped the price? I'm sure it was £280 about 10 minutes ago.

EDIT : Thanks anyway if you have. Will you keep until jan when I was planning on buying the card?
 
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The question I am wondering is will we see a 7970 dual GPU card?

6GB of GDDR on one card?

Certainly would break the barrier and be a first but not sure we'll see it.
 
The 7990 was rumoured to be 2-3 months behind the 7970 but I can see it being delayed if they're charging £450-£500 for the 7970. Can see them hanging it back until just before Kepler is released and then adjust their line up in one go once the competition is known.
 
Well the dual-GPU solution was always meant to be AMD's way of "taking on" the top-end nVidia card so releasing it before would be pointless (unless they already knew how it would perform).
 
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