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Any 8970 launch news / rumors?

FoxEye said:
He recently posted that AMD have cancelled Steamroller, and all future "big core" desktop chips. Something AMD then immediately denied.

So... jury is out, really.
Click to expand...

He's rarely wrong and it doesn't lack sense for AMD, ultimately Bulldozer sales vs APU sales are laughably small, its a bigger part with as high tdp, no gpu, and quite possibly lower yields.

At some point AMD should can their none APU lines. They are moving towards having tools available to help people program to get the best out of the GPU as well when possible though we aren't really that close to those tools being easy to use or complete. Its their goal though, and really big high TDP cores really don't stack up to Intel, their APU's do.

You can take a Trinity and bench it against ANY Intel APU and it WILL win multiple tests, basically all gaming tests by a mile, and it even gets close in some types of CPU tests, Bulldozer actually got very close and beat the Intel chips in a few area's, but for much higher power.

The real issue is, partially because of the process, that a 60W Trinity gives you something like 85% of the performance of a 100W trinity with not much higher clocks, if AMD was on 22nm like Intel and producing 60W trinitys against Intel's 60-70W chips, things would be looking pretty good for them.

Ultimately press wise, review sites, Trinity paints a very good overall picture and a 8 core, process behind, higher voltage to get competitive clocks so higher TDP cpu only, doesn't compete(in the eyes of Joe Average) as well.

So I can well see Steamroller 8 core no gpu chips being cancelled, next gen APU with Steamroller cores could be pretty great for AMD though.... even though management are donig their best to screw AMD and it looks to be delayed. IF they can bump Trinity single threaded performance by 25-30%(which looks entirely possible with Steamroller cores) they suddenly have a really very good chip on their hands. If we get companies utilising the on die gpu(for Intel and AMD, its pretty much essential long term) its a win for everyone.


Either way, AMD next gen, realistically if they went with a tweaked architecture, they won't go hugely bigger, might push up to 400mm2, higher clocks, lower power due to process improvements, nothing spectacular at all.

if they push out a Nvidia style next to no DP version, and cut the bus and make a "gaming only" card, because about 0.0003% of gamers need DP performance, they could potentially gain a lot. Simply put a 350mm2 card based on the 7870, with as high clocked 256mbit bus memory as possible, with could do 30-40% more performance than a 7970.... at the same size/cost, or could go 20% faster, smaller and cheaper than we have now.

I just don't know if AMD have the engineering staff to make a significant change for what is mostly a refresh.....
 
I've heard the next release of Ati cards will require you to write your own drivers. The cards will only come with 'Hello World' drivers to get you go, and literally will display 'Hello World' when you attempt to run any games.


:p
 
drunkenmaster said:
He's rarely wrong and it doesn't lack sense for AMD, ultimately Bulldozer sales vs APU sales are laughably small, its a bigger part with as high tdp, no gpu, and quite possibly lower yields.

At some point AMD should can their none APU lines. They are moving towards having tools available to help people program to get the best out of the GPU as well when possible though we aren't really that close to those tools being easy to use or complete. Its their goal though, and really big high TDP cores really don't stack up to Intel, their APU's do.
Click to expand...

Perhaps I read it wrong, but it seemed that he was saying AMD had abandoned the Steamroller architecture. Including the APUs? In order to focus on ARM chips?

Abadoning non-APUs does make sense, but that wasn't how I understood the article.
 
amd's jump from the 6 to the 7 series and nvidia's jump from the 5 to the 6 was all based from going from the 32nm chip to the new 28nm chip.

the 8 series is still 28nm if there is a jump in performance i doubt it will be much.

EDIT, after a bit more reading it seems that 8000 "oland" is focusing more on power efficiany.
 
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opstrat said:
amd's jump from the 6 to the 7 series and nvidia's jump from the 5 to the 6 was all based from going from the 32nm chip to the new 28nm chip.

the 8 series is still 28nm if there is a jump in performance i doubt it will be much.

EDIT, after a bit more reading it seems that 8000 "oland" is focusing more on power efficiany.
Click to expand...

Or another way of looking at it

Better power efficiency = the chance to pack more transisters on a chip.

There is no way AMD are going to sit on their hands while nvidia bump up the performance by 10 or 15% for their next gen cards.
 
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