AMD 7000 series details leaked

[arc@css]

New architecture seems to be the most common reference. Anyway, we hope so!

 

[SheepBeast]

So is the GNC architecture a brand spanking new architecture or just a tweak the previous generations? Enthusiasts and commentators have bemoaned that AMD have become to reliant on just tweaking the same architecture its had since the 2900 days.

from what i have read i think it's a completely new architecture. obviously they'll base it off stuff they learned with earlier architectures but it's definitely a big change

 

[rolypolyman]

Waiting patiently for the 7***series, my 470 still does very nicely thank you and I only run it at stock. Criminal I know but I dont see the need.

 

[Elevon]

7000 series has been delayed until 2012 ,http://www.nordichardware.com/news/71-graphics/44180-amd-hd-7000-delayed-to-2012.html .

The launch has been moved from 2011 to 2012 due to high demand for the HD 6000 series, and capacity problems. AMD has been having capacity problems over the last months for HD 6000, which has led to orders from OEM manufacturers and distribution channels have been stacking up. It also says that the HD 6000 series is hardly a year old and there is no rush to introduce the HD 7000 at the present day.

 

[233]

oooh have absolutely no need for one(got a 6970 overclocked and came at 1920x1200 (ish) but shiny new hardware is shiny new hardware

 

[Nymins]

AMD in delay shocker.

Glad I got my 6950 tbh.

 

[xsistor]

As for GNC, again, mostly down to misinformation probably, its more likely to be around a 10% drop in shader power as thats the rough amount theres usually been between the top two cards for a while now.

LOL... are you trying to say GCN? ... Graphics Core Next

 

[rajravat]

Damn it, not sure I can wait that long

 

[Purgatory]

Ohh well looks like the green team may get my money this time round if amd keep playing these silly games, "the launch has been moved from 2011 to 2012 due to high demand for the HD 6000 series" seriously ? What planet are they on, the 6000 series is selling that slowly some companies refuse to stock them because customers know their 5000 series cards are just as good, the 6000 series is nothing more then a revamp of the 5000 series of cards and hardly any performance difference, the 6950 and 5870 are really the same speed and sometimes the 5870 will actually beat the 6950 and if you look at the FLOPS of the cards the 5870 is actually more powerful. Then we get to the 6970 reality check it's nothing more then a 5890 as they did with the 4870 to 4890. So the excuse of there is lots of demand for these cards to me is a total lie, what they mean is they have warehouses full of stock they can't shift and can't afford to make a huge loss on them if they bring out the 7000 series.


Also anyone here with a good understanding of graphics card architecture ? How much faster do you honestly think the 7970 is going to be compared to the 6970 or even a GTX 580 ? Is it going to be a jump like going from 4870 to 5870 ? If not i'm avoiding this card too, like I did with the 6950's and 6970's. I'm not throwing away 2/3 of the price of my cards every 1 to 2 years to get a 10% boost grrr. Also crossfire scaling is not important to me, I like 1 card solutions.

So guys what you think or should I just go GTX 580 or even GTX 590 or if they make a 6990 that does not sound like a jet engine?

I'm leaning more towards Nvidia this time due to FSX working better with their cards and also getting fed up of the never ending driver/profile updates from AMD.


Also anyone moved from a 5870 or 6950 or 6970 to a Nvidia 580 or 590 ? If so can you please tell me how the video quality is on the Nvidia cards compared to the AMD/ATI cards ? Last Nvidia card I used was some Ultra something and the video quality for desktop and movies sucked bad. Is it still noticable the change in video quality ?


All I need to hear now is Ivy bridge will be delayed to 2013 and will still only come as a quadcore and extreme £1000 versions will have 6 or more cores... just to wind me up more.. Seriously this is why the world is so messed up at the moment no company out there is considering what it's customers want to spend their hard earned cash on. I'm not going to update my Q9650 for a 25% speed jump to sandy bridge grrr (Keep advertising on TV Intel, it's not working on me and the educated population) .. I want more cores it's not all about gaming for some of us. I hope AMD's Bulldozer with 8 cores wakes Intel up and brings out some well priced 8 core Ivy Bridge chips and I don't want the damn intergrated graphics for my destop, I wish they would keep that for laptop chips only or OEM chips for system builders.

Rant over ... getting fed up with the latest hardware and their tiny peformance jumps every year. I can't justify spending that much money or my time in building these new setups so far.

Thanks guys.

 

[Freddie1980]

Ohh well looks like the green team may get my money this time round if amd keep playing these silly games, "the launch has been moved from 2011 to 2012 due to high demand for the HD 6000 series" seriously ? What planet are they on, the 6000 series is selling that slowly some companies refuse to stock them because customers know their 5000 series cards are just as good,

Thanks guys.

I take it you pulled that information from here?

 

[Duff-Man]

Also anyone here with a good understanding of graphics card architecture ? How much faster do you honestly think the 7970 is going to be compared to the 6970 or even a GTX 580 ? Is it going to be a jump like going from 4870 to 5870 ?

Yes. Due to the big reduction in process size there will be a lot bigger jump in performance this time around.

GPUs are constructed from transistors, and with more transistors you can have more shaders, more texture units - more of everything (assuming the design is stable enough). The area of the transistors this time around (28nm process) will be less than half that of the current gen (40nm process), meaning we should see twice as many of them in the high-end GPUs. This means big jumps in performance... We haven't see a doubling of transistor density across a single generation in a LONG time.

A few more details reposted from this thread:

The change in lengthscale is a factor of 1.43, but silicon chips are 2D arrangements of transistors. Reducing the size of a transistor by 1.43 will increase the number you can pack into a given area by a factor of (1.43)^2 = 2.05.

You can see this by looking at transistor counts and process sizes of past GPUs. Take, for example, the jump from GT200 to GF100:

* The GTX280 has a transistor density of 2.43 million transistors per mm^2 (1.4Bn transistors over 576mm^2), and uses a 65nm process.
* The GTX480 has a transistor density of 6.05 million per mm^2 (3.2Bn over 529mm^2), and uses a 40nm process.

A straight application of the area-density rule would predict an increase in transistor density of (65/40)^2 = 2.64. In reality we see an increase of 2.49.

The same thing applies for 8800GTX -> GTX280: 90nm->65nm predicts an increase of 1.98x in transistor density, but in reality we saw an increase of 2.06x. It's never a 100% precise calculation, since design specifics will also affect transistor density, but it's always a good estimate.

This generation, transistor density will be roughly double that of the previous generation. Assuming that die sizes are similar to recent generations, we can expect double the number of transistors. This allows double the number of shaders, texture units, cache etc etc.The only thing that may stop the next generation cards from exceeding 580GTX SLI or 6970x-fire levels would be power draw limitations.

 

[Purgatory]

Freddie1980 not sure what sort of fetishes you are into mate, but i'm not interested .

Seriously Freddie1980 do you honestly think in the last 2 years we have had good value for money from the new computer technology ? If you owned a decent core 2 quad and jumped ship to sandybridge and find it's not really any faster then what you had before would you think it was good value ? Or worse the silly naming games AMD is playing with their cards to hide the fact their 5000 series are very good cards and renamed all the 6000 series to confuse the general public ? I honestly thought that was a dirty trick to do that, they should have renamed them fully and made a totally new numbering system so consumers would wonder and look up the cards and see how they really rate.

The confusion they added was for example, I had a customer come to me saying why is my 6870 slower then my 5870 ? It's a newer card ... Then I had to go explaining the naming change AMD pulled and you know what that customer said ? They felt ripped off and returned the card to the seller, so the poor seller now has to sell the card as B grade and make a further loss on it. Anyway it's late mate.. I'm sure you see what I mean.. If you are into tech as I am and have been for over 20 years you would see last 2 years have been not too good to the computer market and I don't mean the gamers side, the regular power users for work systems are finding they have to get £1000 extreme chips with more cores to see a benefit for upgrading or go Dual Chip Xeon based workstations.

 

[Purgatory]

Yes. Due to the big reduction in process size there will be a lot bigger jump in performance this time around.

GPUs are constructed from transistors, and with more transistors you can have more shaders, more texture units - more of everything (assuming the design is stable enough). The area of the transistors this time around (28nm process) will be less than half that of the current gen (40nm process), meaning we should see twice as many of them in the high-end GPUs. This means big jumps in performance... We haven't see a doubling of transistor density across a single generation in a LONG time.

A few more details reposted from this thread:

Thanks Duff-Man yes I understand that the process size will add more transistors and should in theory make things faster.. What I'm asking is how much faster do you think the 7970 will be compared to a 6970 or even the good old 5870. Do you think it's going to be a jump like the 4870 to 5870 in performance ? If so I will hold on till then and hope they price them at under £300-£325.

 

[TAC4U]

I just want to see the next dual-GPU card they put out. I grabbed a 5970 nearly two years ago and have been waiting for a decent replacement, as the 6990 didn't offer much in the way of performance gains and suffered from excessive noise from the cooler. Saying that, there really isn't much that's testing my hardware currently, so I'm in no hurry to upgrade.

The 6xxx series didn't have much appeal to me and nVidia didn't get the price right with their cards either. The next games I'm interested in are RAGE, Skyrim and Borderlands 2 - if any of those turn out to be particularly demanding then I'll have to check out the 7xxx series.

 

[Duff-Man]

Do you think it's going to be a jump like the 4870 to 5870 in performance ? If so I will hold on till then and hope they price them at under £300-£325.

Yes, I would be expecting at least that kind of performance jump. I wouldn't hold your breath about getting a top-end single GPU card for £325 on release though.

 

[MeMeMeMe]

Personally I'd prefer if if they didn't max out the possible performance increase, but started reducing the size of the cards again. The 58xx/69xx cards are ridiculously large.

 

[Bobisuruncle54]

Any 'news' is just a rumour for now. The only real news we have heard has been from an AMD rep stating that we can expect them this year, however this was now said some time ago, so timings could have changed.

Now, I also don't know why people are saying the low end will come out first - the 5000 series launched with the 5870 and 5850, the 6000 also with the 6870 and 6850. Granted, I know that the 6800s are not the high end, but with any sense, AMD will have the correct strategy in place:

Release new cards that run Battlefield 3 faster than anything else in time for its release.

As we know, BF3 is going to be a huge title for the PC, and it also looks like it will be the most demanding. For this reason, AMD should be looking to capitalise on gamers that will want to upgrade for this game, releasing just the 7970 and 7950, and perhaps a 7800 card.

It's been shown in the past that Nvidia and AMD will fight over that one popular, demanding game - it happened with Half Life 2, and it happened with Crysis. Let's hope the same with apply for BF3. It's not just about having the fastest cards for these AAA games, but also the consumer mind-share that comes with it.

 

[Freddie1980]

Freddie1980 not sure what sort of fetishes you are into mate, but i'm not interested .

Seriously Freddie1980 do you honestly think in the last 2 years we have had good value for money from the new computer technology ? If you owned a decent core 2 quad and jumped ship to sandybridge and find it's not really any faster then what you had before would you think it was good value ? Or worse the silly naming games AMD is playing with their cards to hide the fact their 5000 series are very good cards and renamed all the 6000 series to confuse the general public ? I honestly thought that was a dirty trick to do that, they should have renamed them fully and made a totally new numbering system so consumers would wonder and look up the cards and see how they really rate.

The confusion they added was for example, I had a customer come to me saying why is my 6870 slower then my 5870 ? It's a newer card ... Then I had to go explaining the naming change AMD pulled and you know what that customer said ? They felt ripped off and returned the card to the seller, so the poor seller now has to sell the card as B grade and make a further loss on it. Anyway it's late mate.. I'm sure you see what I mean.. If you are into tech as I am and have been for over 20 years you would see last 2 years have been not too good to the computer market and I don't mean the gamers side, the regular power users for work systems are finding they have to get £1000 extreme chips with more cores to see a benefit for upgrading or go Dual Chip Xeon based workstations.

I don't have a problem with you stating you opinions on AMD numbering system but my previous post related to you saying the 6000 was selling poorly and stating it as a fact when you didn't back it up with some evidence that's all. In fact based on purely colloquial evidence the 6000 is enjoying a boost in sales thank to an article run on [H] on Bit-mining which has been attributed to the shortage of 6000 cards in August the the devaluation of a Bitcoin.

I would agree with you in as much as AMD messed with their numbering system changes but as for your customer he only has himself to blame. Why you might ask? He should have at least read a couple of reviews first which would have told your customer what to expect. Why would you layout £180 or whatever it cost on a new piece of kit without researching it before hand?

 

[Purgatory]

[H] on Bit-mining which has been attributed to the shortage of 6000 cards in August the the devaluation of a Bitcoin.

bit-mining is dead and as you will see people are selling off their cards quicker then the shops are selling them.

t as for your customer he only has himself to blame. Why you might ask? He should have at least read a couple of reviews first which would have told your customer what to expect. Why would you layout £180 or whatever it cost on a new piece of kit without researching it before hand?

That is exactly what I told him but I can see how easy it was to be confused by this silly numbering change. Just felt sorry for him because he sold his 5870 to fund the 6870 only to find he purchased something worse.. That's one customer AMD has lost for good now, he was that upset he went over to Nvidia after swearing he would not ever go back to Nvidia but to him AMD pulled a dirty trick on it's customers and he would rather deal with Nvidia. I felt the same to be honest and feel the same about the 69XX cards too they are hardly any better then the 58xx series. Nvidia this round has all bases covered I think with their 5XX cards, the 580 is a cracking card even at the price it's at and the 480's went for a steal price for a period.

 

[TheRealDeal]

bit-mining is dead and as you will see people are selling off their cards quicker then the shops are selling them.




That is exactly what I told him but I can see how easy it was to be confused by this silly numbering change. Not to mention nvidia were the kings of name changing Just felt sorry for him because he sold his 5870 to fund the 6870 only to find he purchased something worse.. That's one customer AMD has lost for good now, he was that upset he went over to Nvidia after swearing he would not ever go back to Nvidia but to him AMD pulled a dirty trick on it's customers and he would rather deal with Nvidia. I felt the same to be honest and feel the same about the 69XX cards too they are hardly any better then the 58xx series. Nvidia this round has all bases covered I think with their 5XX cards, the 580 is a cracking card even at the price it's at and the 480's went for a steal price for a period.

I think you are forgetting that nvidia only improved there performance as much as amd did not to mention they are the kings of changing names of cards that are no better than there previous gen as they were effectively the same chip ie g92 8800gt/9800gt/gts240 or 8800gts/9800gtx/gts250. If you had a gtx480 then going to a gtx580 was pointless as you were not getting much performance for your money. People that buy cards without researching first are just stupid end of story.

Who in there right mind is going to think a card costing £180-£200 on release is going to be a serious upgrade to a £300 card released only a year before.

Amd said they were changing there naming scheme and it was there for all to see. Its not like it was hidden away. It was a little underhand but with a 2 minute google he would have found the answers he was looking for. I am not saying amd never knew they would get some people thinking the 6870 was an upgrade but you cant say that nvidia is great either as both of them in the past have done this kind of thing.