Quote Originally Posted by Helmore View Post
That's only about 200 million more than RV770 already has, doesn't sound too far off and it probably is a pretty conservative estimate. I'd say that RV790 has more than that, if it has a 256-bit memory bus.

@LordEC911: I don't think they'll change the amount of SPs per cluster/SIMD-core, that would be too much of a redesign and it would increase their ALU/TEX ratio even further (to 6:1 in your case). That's something they won't do with what is supposed to be a reasonably straight shrink. I guess we will only see an increase in the amount of clusters. I've no idea what they will do with their RBEs/ROPs, I don't think they will change the way they work and I therefor don't really expect an increase in ROPs/RBEs. Or they would add more ROP/RBE clusters with each a 32-bit memory controller instead of a 64-bit one, I think that would require the least amount of changes to the ROP/RBE section while still being able to increase the amount of ROPs/RBEs. Oh well, in the end it is all guess work for us and we may all be completely wrong.
I know I had this discussion over at B3D but do you recall how exactly the TMUs are setup? Is it a quad for each SIMD? I thought that was my original assumption when looking at some of the architecture shots of R600/RV670 but I recall being told something different.

If they don't increase the number of SPs per SIMD, from 16-24, then there really isn't much they can do with RV790. They could up the SIMDs to 12 like was talked about before that isn't much of an increase.

AMD/ATi really needs to go back to back to back with strong GPUs if they really want to take over even more marketshare.