Quote Originally Posted by zerazax View Post
Why?

The drivers say at least 2 cards are going to be VLIW4 within NI, and since its not Barts but we have Cayman and Antilles to come...
Hmm... haven't seen that.. mind linking me?


VLIW5 stands for "Very Long Instruction Word" 5; VLIW standing for the architecture basis, 5 for the number of execution units.
Each shader 'unit' is composed of 5 execution units, 4 of them being 'simple', with the 5th being able to handle all functions, including transcendental functions.
This is one (of many) reasons that AMD's u-arch's generally have more shaders than nvidia, yet has comparable performance; unless the developer specifically codes for this unique computing style, a game will only use some of the execution units. This is also one reason why the theoretical computation power for AMD's u-arch's are far greater than what is actually achieved in actual applications, because AMD's figures assume that all execution units are utilized.