AMD Radeon HD6950/6970(Cayman) Reviews

[Mad Pistol]

1920 was likely for the 32nm Ibiza card. On 40nm that number would have pushed the HD 6970 well beyond the 300W mark if AMD had any hope of retaining nominal clock speeds.

That sounds right, and that would explain why the SP count is actually lower than it is on the 5870. The 6970 is still about 10% faster (without driver optimizations). The only way I can see that as viable is that the core clock is slightly higher and that the architecture was slightly revised.

Other than that, everything else checks out. It's just... weird. I know we didn't have a node reduction this time, but for Nvidia to produce a huge architectural improvement and AMD not has me trying to guess what happened. From what I can figure out, Cypress came out exactly the way it was supposed to and GF100 didn't. Enter GF110, and suddenly everything is wonderful in Nvidia's camp, while AMD is trying to bleed Cayman for every ounce of performance that it can.

In other words...




GF110 is the bee's knees.

Cypress is the bee's knees.

Cayman is trying really hard to make honey from tired bees.