Quote:
Originally Posted by marten_larsson
It has been stated all along that all Evergreen could run up to 6 displays, the only problem being number of ports on the cards.
I'm getting the feeling that we might not see the Hemlock XT surface first but the 5950 with dual 5850s and the 725/1000 clock that has been floating around. Why? Because ATI wants something to launch when Fermi is launching even though the 5950 should beat it also. It has also a lot of other pro's like giving time for the other cards to get a slight price drop before releasing 5970, more time to build up stock, more time for driver development and so on.
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On the other hand, they could prefer to launch the Hemlock XT part now from a commercial POV.
If Fermi and Hemlock XT are launched at the same time, and Cypress < Fermi < Hemlock (most probable IMO), some of the people who are buying an enthusiast product would go to the higher performance route (HD5900) and some people would go to the single GPU higher performance route (GTX300).
Now, if they launch Hemlock XT a few months sooner than Fermi, I think a good part of this people would buy it. Then, when Fermi is released, few people with a Hemlock XT card would go back to a single GPU (but lesser performant) GTX300. So it could be better for them to launch Hemlock XT now instead of waiting to have a competitor.
And of course, if NVIDIA ends up launching a dual Fermi solution (I guess they will or not depending on power consumption) that is more performant than Hemlock XT, it would be much better for AMD to have launched their own a few months before, and every sale they could before that card is on the market. But probably if they launch a dual Fermi card, it will be severely crippled to adjust to the 300W max load power, so it may end up being equal, worse or better performant than Hemlock XT.
The worst part about selling Hemlock XT now, is that if TSMC is having problems supplying enough Cypress chips for the current HD5800 series, then start selling cards with 2x chips per card instead of 1... Anyway, I suppose Hemlock cards are going to sell much less units than Cypress (and those much less than Juniper) so maybe that is not a problem at all.