[VC] AMD Radeon HD 9000 Series Launching in October?

[Final8ty]

June was surely a month of GeForce GTX 700 series. NVIDIA launched three cards in less than 30 days without any actual response from AMD.

If you thought that AMD engineers were on vacation then you are mistaken. Apparently they were working on new GPUs, especially a Hawaii silicon, which is believed to power the upcoming Radeon HD 9970 and HD 9950. Yes, that?s not a typo, AMD will supposedly drop the HD 8000 naming reserved for OEM-parts, and use HD 9000 instead. This was rumored for a long time, but people were not convinced enough to confirmed it. According to my sources this is true, there won?t be any Radeon HD 8970 non-OEM card, which if you think about actually makes sense. Imagine two cards having the same name, but different specs. Maybe now people will stop posting Radeon HD 8970 OEM datasheet as a news about a leaked document directly from AMD site (seriously don?t do that).

According to ChinaDIY, AMD could be preparing its Radeon HD 9000 series for October, which is the launch month for Battlefield 4, a Gaming Evolved title. My information is more optimistic. Unless the roadmap has changed, AMD could show off the new series in September. Some sources even claim it could be the first week of September. Regardless of what month is it going to be, we are two or three months until the new series arrive. Most likely AMD will start with HD 9970, which if the rumors are true will be faster than GeForce GTX 780, but slower than GTX TITAN. However the big question is not the performance, but the price. If the card would cost $550, then we have a clear winner.

The Chinese source also claims that AMD will resurrect the Radeon 9550, only now with the HD-part. Interesting fact is that it?s almost exactly 9 years since the launch of this card.

http://videocardz.com/43446/amd-rade...nching-october


Bring me the HD9990 goodness.

[behrouz]

More Like Nvidia Story : Geforce 3xx and 4xx Series.

Edit :

Most likely AMD will start with HD 9970, which if the rumors are true will be faster than GeForce GTX 780, but slower than GTX TITAN

What the hell? Slower than Titan After two generations ? Man , AMD HD9970 should be match At least Geforce 690 GTX just like HD7970 Is more powerfull than Geforce 490 GTX (?)

[Miwo]

AMD needs to bring back the 9700Pro at $299, like the good old glory days

[boxleitnerb]

If the GPUs are still made on 28nm, I wouldn't be surprised if they could not quite beat the Titan.

[Chickenfeed]

Shouldn't these be on a smaller node? We are creeping up on dual 8pin at 28nm and that's just no fun.

[m_jones_]

More Like Nvidia Story : Geforce 3xx and 4xx Series.

Edit :



What the hell? Slower than Titan After two generations ? Man , AMD HD9970 should be match At least Geforce 690 GTX just like HD7970 Is more powerfull than Geforce 490 GTX (?)

But titan is still $1000 while the AMD cards should be much cheaper than it, no real need to dump excessive R&D into such a project for a small market.
The 590 actually was a better card than the 7970 http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/508?vs=516

[DefStar]

A $550 card that's ~5-10% slower than Titan depending on the game engine?...and that's not even being optimistic. This sounds like the AMD/ATI we've come to know, they always come through since AMD took over. These cards will be beast and probably get a bump in up in VRAM if the new console games are going to soak up that 8GB they have. Also, I'm pretty sure the 9000 series would have been on a smaller node if TSMC could of done it. I got high hopes for AMD's GPU division, I think over the next few years Nvida is going to become overwhelmed...they just don't price their cards right, they took the performance lead and instead of taking over the $550 price tier...they just start a new $650 and $1000 tiers??? WTF Nvidia, you have become to conceded or you simply can't produce affordable chips. I love how when Nvidia delivers the next gen first we get a huge price hike, but when AMD does it they do the right thing and take over the top tiers and lower the last gen's prices. Honestly, I think Nvidia did us consumers dirty this time because they didn't get the Xbox or Playstation deal...and they are worried. I'm not starting a flame war but, I really think Nvidia should have replaced their last gen. line-up with the new 700 series...not pull this OMG WE GOT THESE SUPER UBER SO FAST CARDS THAT AMD WILL NEVER CATCH UP TO SO WE GOT TO SELL THEM FOR $300 AND $500 MORE THAN LAST GENERATION OMG AMD DRIVERS WILL NEVER WORK AND WE CONTROL THE VIDEO MARKET SO GET DOWN ON YOUR KNEES AND PAY UP FOR ROYALTIES WE TOOK ALL YOUR CASTLES! Yeah, right Nvidia...2 months later AMD's drivers are fixed and 4 months later AMD's cards are just as fast but still $300 and $500 cheaper because your new price tiers only exist at Nvidia.

Yes, I realize Nvida has always price gouged early adopters and many people are aware of how Nvida plays. It's just so anoying that they do it though. They sit there and dangle the current fastest card in-front of your face and say,"oh but wait, we wan't $200 or $300 more than it's actually worth until we get some competition." Then a couple months later they drop the prices to $50 to $100 more then AMD's competing card and justify the extra price as being the premium that people who want physics and cuda have to pay. Which makes sense if you want that stuff I guess. Eh, I just don't care about proprietary gimmicks that really don't seem to deliver. Truly, Nvidia has in the past been the one with exclusive partnerships with game developers...Hence their "The Way it Was Meant to be Played" slogan. But, as of late, AMD seems to be the ones taking over that role with exclusive partnerships with developers. Nvidia, is just playing the big name reputation card and price gouging harder than they ever have before...We'll see how it plays out, but my $$$ is on AMD.

[LordEC911]

What the hell? Slower than Titan After two generations ? Man , AMD HD9970 should be match At least Geforce 690 GTX just like HD7970 Is more powerfull than Geforce 490 GTX (?)

What two generations?
7970 was Jan 2012 and Titan was Feb 2013...

If the GPUs are still made on 28nm, I wouldn't be surprised if they could not quite beat the Titan.

This is the first source that has stated Hawaii is slower than Titan.
But I do agree with you and m_jones, it wouldn't be overly surprising and they don't need to overspend on R&D and manufacturing with 20nm ramping up in 1H 2014.

Shouldn't these be on a smaller node? We are creeping up on dual 8pin at 28nm and that's just no fun.

20nm won't be ready until the end of the year at the earliest, though it will likely be sometime 1H 2014 before we see any 20nm cards in retail.

[Lanek]

This is the first source that has stated Hawaii is slower than Titan.

The most funny is the source of the original article ( Inpai ) absolutely dont write that. Look like they really want to write between the lines. In reality they even write the complete invert story .

[tajoh111]

Bringing about 30% more performance is going to be tough for AMD(to beat a gtx 780). Its going to take a bigger than 400mm2 die to do it if they stay on 28nm. Adding shaders doesn't do that much alone as similarly clocked 7970/ 7950 show. Add in AMD needs to add more compute stuff if they want to have people take it seriously as a professional card and it seems kind of improbable.

, even in more favorable conditions, AMD brought 15-20% more performance to the table with the 5870 to 6970 change. This was easier to bring about because the 5870 used a lot less power than a 7970 uses, was smaller and the 5870 had the tesselation weakness.

Scaling upward with die size, it doesn't seem GCN is particularly that good with power consumption and AMD needs high clocks for their 7xxx series to perform well.

Before jumping on the hawaii band wagon, people have to remember the jump between 5870 and 6970. People hyped it up like the second coming and look how that delivered.

Leaking this type of rumor seems more like a move from AMD to get people to wait for their cards as they have nothing to release for a while.

I think Nvidia should have a gtx 785 ready in october(2496 park with a ddr5 at 1750mhz) for whatever AMD releases if this rumors turns out true.

However, I think it would be best for AMD to focus their resources on getting their 20nm card off the ground first, then this 28nm project. Even Nvidia seem happy not making true revisions and they have a lot more money and alot more marketshare. With the little cash reserves AMD has, it doesn't make sense to make a big 450mm2vanity project as they don't have the professional market in place to support it yet. The apple deals isn't close enough. They need super computing projects in the 50 million plus region like the titan super computer.

AMD needs to bring back the 9700Pro at $299, like the good old glory days

The $299 dollar high end is dead. R and D and silicon are too expensive. The closest thing we get to a glory card like that is something like the gtx 460 when it came out. A mid range performing closer to the high end and bringing prices down.

Big chips at 300 dollars are not profitable.

[Zloyd]

Wow its being optimistic but here's to AMD beating GTX 780 and being single card king !!

[Lanek]

Wow its being optimistic but here's to AMD beating GTX 780 and being single card king !!

The difference is not so high, 22 % at 1440p, and surely a bit more at 1080p .. more or less 25% ... http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...review-15.html


Maybe IF they release first a 28nm gpu around November, this could be the midrange, ( this can explain the " 9550 " gaming story ), followed in Q1-Q2 2014 by the 20nm parts, high end and computing...

[LordEC911]

The difference is not so high, 22 % at 1440p, and surely a bit more at 1080p .. more or less 25% ... http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...review-15.html


Maybe IF they release first a 28nm gpu around November, this could be the midrange, ( this can explain the " 9550 " gaming story ), followed in Q1-Q2 2014 by the 20nm parts, high end and computing...

That last bit was my first thought when the first rumors of VI came about, AMD making a "highend" gaming chip like GK104 that was compute-lite.
But with GCN development/release they have basically stated that they are sticking to a top-bottom compute architecture and won't be going that route.

I don't really see them having a problem beating GTX780 and competing with Titan.

[PedantOne]

whats ive heard, will be launched sooner then october and highest one-gpu model beats Titan

[DJ_Datte]

Looking at AMD so far, it makes sense that they do a refresh at 28nm now, and do a stable 20nm release in around Q3 2014.

[Lanek]

No idea what the source is .. or from where he have take the info.

http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/amd...n_october.html

More and rumors are circulating that AMD may introduce its Radeon HD 9000 as early as October. The company is anticipated to skip the 8000-series as it already sells Radeon HD 8000-branded parts to OEMs. The first Radeon HD 9000 family parts are anticipated to be Curacao and Hainan, two 28nm chips based on the GCN 2.0 architecture. The new architecture reportedly has an improved front-end with 4 asynchronous computing engines [ACEs] and 3 geometry engines, as well as a higher number of stream processors.

Since at present AMD sells re-badged Radeon HD 7000 products as Radeon HD 8000-series products to OEMs, it is logical for the company to utilize Radeon HD 9000 sequence for its new line of graphics cards. ATI Technologies’ original Radeon 9000-series products based on code-named R300-family graphics processing units revolutionized the market of graphics cards a decade ago and helped ATI (which now belongs to AMD) to become the producer of market leading graphics solutions.

The Curacao XT graphics processor is expected to feature 2304 stream processors (36 compute units), 144 texture units, 48 render back ends and 384-bit memory controller. The Hainan is projected to have 1792 stream processors (28 compute units), 112 texture units, 32 render back ends and 256-bit memory controller. Both chips will share the same front-end (just-like current-gen Radeon HD 7900 and 7800 do) with 4 asynchronous computing engines [ACEs], 3 geometry engines, command processor, global data share and so on.

[mcnbns]

How come Hainan (HD 9950?) sounds slower than a 7950?

I know this stuff is as yet unconfirmed, but does it look like there's going to be a Curacao Pro, as it were (2048 stream procs, 128 texture units, 48 ROPs, 384-bit mem bus)? That's what I want to buy: faster than a 7970 and around 400 dollars.

[[XC] Lead Head]

AMD needs to bring back the 9700Pro at $299, like the good old glory days

I'd love for AMD to pay homage to the cards that really made them famous. HD 9700Pro - has a good ring to it!

[Lightman]

I'd love for AMD to pay homage to the cards that really made them famous. HD 9700Pro - has a good ring to it!

I just bought one 2 weeks ago. Great card! It also OC well on my nostalgia rig (XP3000+, 1GB DDR400, nForce 2 MCP) and on AIR stock card 350MHz GPU is not a problem!

Back in old days I had 9500non-Pro modded to 9700 That was mega upgrade!

[Lanek]

I'd love for AMD to pay homage to the cards that really made them famous. HD 9700Pro - has a good ring to it!

Well it was ATI at this time, but yes.. bring us back the 9700Pro ... I still have a 9700Pro Maya edition here ( + a 9800Pro )... ( One Maya was dead on overclocking but the second still working, just cant find an AGP board now )

[DefStar]

What do you guys think...if AMD releases a 9970 that's as fast as Titan and a 9950 that's faster than the 780, will they replace the current higg-end price range with them? I think we will see a $100 bump so 9950 is $450 and the 9970 at $600 on release. That would be the sweet spot to undercut Nvidia because no way will Nvidia go that low and Nvidia fans will consider AMD's offerings at those prices if performance is comparable and the frame pacing driver fix works...AMD will turn some heads.

[tajoh111]

Lol heres comes the hype train. At 20nm I expect these expectations to be met. At 28nm its going to be derailed like every single other launch recently.

[STEvil]

lol there went the de-hype-train

sigh..

[tajoh111]

lol there went the de-hype-train

sigh..

When was the last time the hype train hasn't been derailed? Especially something like the revision like gcn1 --> gcn2. Only time it has been met was a new architecture or/and a new node. And even then the its been a crap shoot.

AMD has its work cut out when their 7970 ghz needs 30 percent(when u include a larger bench suite of games, as sleeping dogs, hitman, dirt showdown skew an average of 6 games) to beat a gtx 780.

7970 ghz already consumes 250 watts of power and scaling is already being limited as more components are being added as seen between the 7970 and the 7950.

If AMD tries to increase the efficiency of the GCN cores in a utilization sense, powers going to go up like it did with the 6970 and 5870 series. If they simply add more parts, they are going to run into a utilization of those cores issue(gk110 already runs into this problem and keplar is more efficient per core for gaming as seen with the competitiveness of gk104 vs tahiti). With the 5870, they were using so little power in the first place, that they could afford the first option. But with a 7970ghz using as much power as it does, the results are going to be more limited because they are stuck on 28nm.

A 2400 core gcn at 1000 mhz is not going to outperform a 2300 core keplar unless they are willing to break some power rules which increase utilization. One of the biggest coveats of gk104 performance is the 256bit bus for memory. With both hawaii and gcn both likely running on 384 bit buses, its going to come down to core efficiency and power consumption. GCN consumes too much power at higher clocks and the cores themselves are less efficient.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/...4#.UdOaBW1u97Q

Look at this review for the gtx 760 vs an overclocked 7950. The overclocked 7950 uses 100 more watts, has a 384 bit memory bus, has 50 percent more cores, is running those cores about 10% slower than a overclocked gtx 760 but only out performs it by 5%.

For such a big monolith part, gk110 is really efficient. Efficient enough it kills the 7970 ghz for performance per watt and at the relevant revolution is on top of the performance per watt charts.

The 5870 had a massive performance per watt advantage over the gtx 480, yet its successor could not beat the fixed gtx 580. With tahiti running behind in performance(there a similar difference between a gtx 780 and 7970 ghz compared to the difference between a 5870 and gtx 580) and way behind in the performance per watt, its successor is going to have a hard time beating the gtx 780.

[Lanek]

ROLLO go out of the body of Tajoh ... Watts / performance are extremely relative, specially if you compare the size of a 4Tflops 7970 vs a GK110 who are not even able to hit this ... on DP rate Nvidia got his lead.. but it is not really efficient.. they need 1/3 rate DP for just beat amd of about 10% of performance when AMD still use 1/4 rate .. ( you are speaking about efficiency in games.. not of the architecture ... games performance are extremely relative )...

The K20x need 520mm2 for just been able to match ( take the lead in DP ) of a 365mm2 chips ... ofc we can debate a long time who is better on games.. but if we speak about real computing thing ( graphics or not ) ... things change a lot.

If AMD can put the same efficiency on games have Kepler .. ( because the efficiency is here, the waste of power got GCN vs Kepler GK110 ( note for make work the GK110 correctly you need switch to K20 style)... here we are speaking about the efficiency of an architecture.. and this dont ask about more shaders ... Bigger L2 cache, more ROPs balance, bigger or faster front end, improve the branch units, a better use of scalar units ?

When you are speaking about efficiency, try to remember the 7970 or S9000 is justg 365mm2 vs a 520mm2 chip...

Architecture performance or efficiency of this architecture are not delivered by games average fps.. or start to write : " i dont think they can push more of a 20% more increase in Crysis 3 "