New rumor about ATI Southern Islands

[LordEC911]

but looking at the specs...
1280sps will be enough to reach 5850s 1440sp performance?
that would be a performance boost of around 12%?
thats not too much... you could get that with clockspeeds alone
765->850mhz...
so then whats the point of rolling out new silicon?
cause its a 10% smaller chip?
idk... this sounds weird... that wouldnt really make sense...

From what it sounds like and if the changes are true, a 1280SP Barts sound be performing around a 5850-5870. A 1280SP 4d design should perform very similar to a 1600SP 5d design, since they supposedly aren't often utilizing the 5th SP in gaming situations and that they are touting "efficiency" as their main goal.

Neliz was saying something quite awhile ago about the 5850 replacement performing around a 5870. Cayman will be taking on the 512SP GF100 with the cutdown/salvage part being slightly ahead of the current 480SP GF100. Think about it, you need around a 20-25% performance increase over 5870 to match/beat GTX480 in most situations. Cayman needs a 10-20% increase over that to match/beat a 512SP GF100, if it stays around 700-750mhz.

So all that math above comes out to a fully specced Cayman needing to be roughly 35-40% faster to fall within those guidelines, which is what I was originally speculating awhile ago.

On a side note, the info from the roadmap is a good 4 years old but the codenames are correct. Also, the dates are there for mass availability, do not base launch/release dates off the roadmap. Most early roadmaps like these usually give a quarter or so for leeway.