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AMD Radeon R9 290X with Hawaii GPU pictured, has 512-bit 4GB Memory

Martini1991 said:
At a higher price point and 2 years later.

;)

Dat progression.

With launch so close, the hype machine is in FULL STEAM.
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And add Mantle into the equation at Christmas and we are looking at:

austin_powers_international_man_of_mystery_one_million_dollars_zps0592c868.jpg
 
drunkenmaster said:
Not even slightly, Titan is a pee take, the 780 is the same chip(or at least afaik) which has a more sensible(but still not sensible at all :p ) price. Ultimately it's very hard to know the yields.

Roughly speaking you have 300mm wafers, so pi*r^2 gives you a wafer area of circa 70500mm^2, divide that by chip size and you get a bit under 130 chips per wafer for GK110, and around 160 for Hawaii XT or about 24% more chips. That assumes square shapes fit perfectly into a circle which obviously they don't. The smaller the chip the less wasted space so a Gk110 wafer could easily be (when you think the outside edge is largest and could effect almost every chip on the outside edge) anything from 5-15 less maybe. Titan is expensive to make, so is Hawaii, but it's not "that" expensive theoretically. What you get into is R&D costs, you might be making a chip that costs $250 with bad yields, but if you're trying to recoup 500mil R&D costs, you add a lot to that price before you even make a profit, which adds more again.

So it's very hard to judge where break even point is. I would think 2 years on from 28nm even Titan will be yielding well enough to be sold relatively cheaply and still make a profit. When you're talking about selling maybe only 5-10 parts from a wafer that are fully working as $2k professional parts, and maybe getting 20-60 more you can sell as various levels of cut down parts as Titan's/780gtx, I'd be very surprised if Titan's couldn't make an effective profit being sold at £500 and 780gtx's way less than that.

I really think if the market just turned it's nose up at Titan's prices they would have crashed it quite happily to £500-600 and sold with a profit. Nvidia just priced it high to see if it would get any sales, nothing stopping them dropping the price by £300 over a few months if it didn't sell, AMD had nothing planned for a while, they had nothing to lose and a decent amount of cash to gain.

Ultimately I don't know if AMD will try the same thing, and if then do and people still buy it, we can look forward to £500 + launch cards every gen from now on at least.

A sensible guess is for any given price AMD can make a profit on the R290x(which could be no where near the sale price) then Titan chips should cost a minimum I would think 30% more for the chip alone(with similarly good yields), probably closer to 40% more if Nvidia's yields aren't good(historically they've been meh for a few gens there) then the pcb/memory costs.... if that was more than $50 extra I'd be surprised.

SO if AMD could sell a R290x at £400 for decent profit, a titan should really be at most £600.
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There was never any doubt in my mind it was justified :D. Do you work in the industry or just keen? You seem pretty clued up on manufacture engineering
 
just keen, and bored a lot so read a lot :p

I did a bit of reviewing years ago, met quite a few people went to the, honestly can't remember, 9800pro or maybe x800xt NDA's media launch thing which back in those days was a tiny hotel conference room, a projector some slides and a sample card not in a working computer, none of this flying everyone out to fancy hotels for a couple days of interesting tech info.

Still met and spoke to some very interesting people, the reviewing side, the benchmarks, all bores me to tears, but the tech side interests me a heck of a lot.

I honestly have no idea how well or badly a Haswell performs, I'll read info on the hardware itself and not give a crap about the numbers.
 
Is there that display overclocking on the R9 like on the Titan? I cant wait for the 290X 8GB version :D

It seems we might make a decent little push now in the next year or two.I just read that DX 11.2 will let them offer massive textures upwards to 10GB in size by using both system and video ram.The Titan pulls ahead on 4K due to the 6GB GDDR5 and even unmodded Skyrm demands a minimum of 3600MB of VRAM.I thought it would have made it a hell of a lot easier for them to pull into the same frame layouts of next gen consols with an 8GB version?


8 cores 8gb of vram and a 7970 is essentially what the PS4 is right?

AMD 9590 8 cores and R9290X would fill in the 8GB of VRAM requirements and leave the user fit to decide on his own system ram.4GB 3000mhz would suffice for example so instead of buying system ram you just spend it on video ram?The only downside is the DX layer but surely Mantle could overcome that and force everything into VRAM?
 
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drunkenmaster said:
just keen, and bored a lot so read a lot :p

I did a bit of reviewing years ago, met quite a few people went to the, honestly can't remember, 9800pro or maybe x800xt NDA's media launch thing which back in those days was a tiny hotel conference room, a projector some slides and a sample card not in a working computer, none of this flying everyone out to fancy hotels for a couple days of interesting tech info.

Still met and spoke to some very interesting people, the reviewing side, the benchmarks, all bores me to tears, but the tech side interests me a heck of a lot.

I honestly have no idea how well or badly a Haswell performs, I'll read info on the hardware itself and not give a crap about the numbers.
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Fair enough! 9800 Pro lol... I had one but was only a wee age of 19
 
What will be interesting for sure is how mantle works on GCN 1.0 vs GCN 2.0(or 1.1, or 38.9, whatever it is). Will having lower level access make them push up usage of things like geometry so high that the new cards will gain significantly more from Mantle than the 7970 can.

If it's launched on the 15th that it will be launched on my birthday.... might be too tempting :p

Currently my thought is that I'll wait for post xmas pricing and hope the early overpriced buying slows and the prices start to come down quickly. Though if it turned out a 290 was 30% faster than a 7970 and gained an extra 20% from Mantle..... that would be hard to resist I think.
 
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