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'Final' 6990 specs

straxusii

straxusii

straxusii

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http://www.hardware-infos.com/news.php?news=3767


It's claiming 2 x 1920 shaders

capturely.jpg
 
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Wow.. pretty stunned if true... awesome but stunned. To me that really put's out the whole performance scale of the chart they showed on those slides.

At least it gives hope to the 6970 having at least 1920 shaders :-D *Pinch of salt needed*


EDIT: memory speed looks suspect to me, as the slides seemed to indicate the memory would be faster thatn 153Gb/s
 
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Rroff said:
Epic card if true but I'm struggling to see how they could make it a 300W card.
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Agreed... Especially confusing since these slides imply that the the board power of the 6970 is up to 300W.

It could be that the true board power of the 6990 is actually much higher than 300W (just as the GTX480 board power was much higher than the stated 250W), or, more likely, AMD is making much more use of their new "power containment" mechanism on the 6990. This would mean that the clockspeed will be artificially reduced in many more applications than on the 6970 (which I presume will have power restriction enabled only for Furmark, GTX580 style). This would lead to a card that doesn't perform as well as would be expected from a slightly downclocked dual-6970 setup.

We will need to wait and see to find out for sure what the power draw is, and how the board's power containment mechanism is implemented.
 
There is no specified limit AFAIK - last time I had anything to do with the PCI-e spec the only hard limits where what you could draw from each of the standard connections. For ratification there is a guide to thermal and electrical management in desktop systems that you'd have to take into account, but I've never seen a hard overall limit.

Obviously if your drawing 75watt from the slot and have 2x PCI-e 6 pin power connectors and thats all that does put a limit on what you can do but theres nothing to say you have to stop there at just those connections.
 
Rroff said:
Obviously if your drawing 75watt from the slot and have 2x PCI-e 6 pin power connectors and thats all that does put a limit on what you can do but theres nothing to say you have to stop there at just those connections.
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Check out these slides; AMD are implementing a "power containment" system, similar to that implemented by the GTX580, to stop power draw exceeding a predefined limit. I was just speculating that this limit could be imposed at 300W (or more?) on the 6990 to stop power draw spiking to unreasonable levels. Clearly IF the 6970 is approaching 300W (unconstrained), then a 6990 card based on dual-6970s will draw far, far more than 300W if left unconstrained, even when downclocked slightly. To stay within (or at least close to) the quoted 300W TDP, there will need to be some kind of hard power-restriction implemented.

Certainly there is no hard limit to the power you can provide via a single PCI-e slot (the GTX480 draws well over 300W in furmark, for example), but if you quote your card's TDP as being 300W you need to constrain it to be at least somewhere near this value.
 
The old slides actually said that the power consumption would be less than 300W for the full Cayman XT, and less than 225W for Cayman Pro. Since those slides were produced in August, AMD probably didn't even know exactly how much the end product would end up consuming.
 
Lightnix said:
Since those slides were produced in August, AMD probably didn't even know exactly how much the end product would end up consuming.
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A fair point... Until we know the expected power draw of a "full-fat" 6970 it's hard to make solid assumptions about the unconstrained draw of a 6990. I still struggle to believe that it will come in close to 300W (unconstrained) using two full Cayman GPUs though. Nvidia will undoubtedly have the same issue (or worse) with their planned dual-GF110 card.
 
psychas said:
strange how 6970 and 6990 has same power consumption in slides :confused:
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It doesn't, they are slides from a month + ago, they are intentionally misleading, the 6970 is <300W, less than 300W, not 300W. Basically it will have a 6 and 8 pin pci-e on the pcb, it could draw anything from 226-300W under load, using a little brain power, its going to be still over 100mm2 smaller than a 580gtx, probably around 130mm2 smaller, or 1/4 or so, it should be around 1/4 less power draw because thats pretty much how life works. 480gtx 60% bigger, 60% higher power draw than the 5870, thats no coincidence.

AS for 300W for a 6990, well, advance power management won't drop below a specced speed, thats simply not how specifications work, would Intel get away with selling a 3.4Ghz cpu with turbo that also sometimes left you at 3Ghz, despite paying for the 3.4Ghz version no.

Power management will be at idle and saving unused power.

When you think about process's, don't think theres 3 processes to choose from.

Essentially you have super high quality process thats more expensive which is usually lower power(its more expensive because it uses more expensive metals and more layers), GPU's almost never use that, its a large increase in cost. Then theres normal "processes" but keep in mind that, you can choose from a dozen different qualities of metal for your metal layers.

Remember a 5970 is 300W, yet has double the memory and more shaders than a 151W 5850.

The difference between the best binned and worst binned chips, normally from centre of the die for the best, are bigger than people think. THe 5970 used the VERY BEST binned Cypress dies, which probably saves 20-30W a core. The problem is, if a 6970 is probably 225-235W or around that, then "ultra binned cores" would need to be 70W lower, that doesn't seem likely.

Will AMD run some more expensive wafers with higher quality metal layers for better power, maybe, will that mean Antilles can't be sold as cheaply as a 3870x2/4870x2/5970 were compared to single gpu card costs, maybe.


Its going to be a freaking beast though, there is a chance the 6970 is actually below 225W in power, if it used 200W or so it would be a complete waste to not have a 6/8pci-e power connector as overclocking would be very very bad, the whole <300W thing could be nothing more than disinformation, as it seems the 1536 shaders was.
 
If these specs turn out to be accurate, the price is kept in check and the reviews are positive then I might look to sell off my 5970 and pick up one of these, particularly if they turn out to be decent overclockers. But I want to know how they're planning to keep temperatures within limits, as the 5970 is a bit quick to down-clock the second GPU when overclocked and under load.
 
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