New rumor about ATI Southern Islands

[saaya]

Unless you're a semiconductor engineer, how could you possibly know that Fermi is power hungry due to "bad design?"

oh, your saying its designed to run hot on purpose then?
but why, you must be an ee engineer to make a claim like that!

I don't think most people here understand that Fermi is the first TRULY computational GPU. All those things you said about convergent technologies into one neat package, are made manifest in Fermi....in the sense that Fermi has many CPU like qualities such as being fully IEEE compliant, support for C++, having dedicated caches and support for much greater VRAM.

oh i think everybody knows that... we all saw those dozens of marketing slides from nvidia of how great fermi is and all the things you can do with it... in theory... i just think nobody cares...
thats not the reason somebody spends 250-500$ on a VGA = video graphics accelerator these days... when they buy a vga, guess what, they want it to ACCELERATE GRAPHICS! shocker!

you can sell chainsaw as a knife and advertise it as "can cut down a tree", itll still suck as a knife and nobody will want to carry such a huge expensive thing from the kitchen to the breakfast table every morning...
and all your talk about how it also serves as an "urban violence solver" and "stress relief super fun toy" wont make it a better knife...

The very fact that a GPU like Fermi, which isn't even a pure gamer chip can outperform Cypress (which is dedicated towards gaming) speaks volumes in and of itself.

and a rocket outperforms a ferrari, does that make it a better race car?

It wouldn't surprise me if Fermi ends up being 20% faster than it was on introduction, simply due to driver optimizations.

on average? hah! hahahahahhaha!

It's only a fact if you hold to your ignorant view that Fermi is a dedicated gaming processor, when the "fact" is, it's not.

can you stop jumping between these two points please? your making my head spin!

fermi isnt a graphics processor!
fermi is an awesome graphics processor!
fermi isnt a graphics processor!

Fermi is much more than just a gaming GPU, and as such, you can't hold it to the same standard as you do Cypress.

again!

It's an assumption based on recurrent past experience, so it's not as though it's groundless.

show us... ive seen several articles on the matter and they all proved that driver improvements of various gpus in the past years have resulted in a ~10% boost at most...
so which past experience are you talking about?
which past gpu makes youy think expecting a 20% boost is reasonable for fermi?
check out the first reviews of rv870 and compare them to the latest reviews comparing it to gf104 etc... and youll see that rv870 saw a boost of less than 10% throughout its lifetime...

It's a FACT that the HPC market is more profitable than the gamer market.

it is?

As I already mentioned previously, a Quadro video card can cost as much as 5,000 USD! With that kind of price tag, is it a groundless assumption to think that Nvidia investing more resources in HPC won't earn them more money?

quadro cards are aimed at hpc? i thought it was tesla?

You think Nvidia is stupid? Why do you think they designed Fermi in the first place?

at that time they were ahead in the graphics field by quite a fair bit, and they probably thought they could get away with all the gpgpu baggage on a gpu... do you think if given the chance nvidia would do the same thing again? i dont think so...

I'll do that the moment you guys stop acting as though the 6000 series is going to own Fermi.

you think its unreasonable to expect a new part to outperform an old part?

Charlie said they had planned a different card but scrapped it and only had Fermi in reserve so they had to make it fit. And I agree with him, Fermi could not really be nvidia's first choice for the gaming market, they would have known it would be a bastard to make but when you're planning to sell at 5k each it's not a issue.

hmmm where did he say that? do you remember the name of the article?

I have to agree there. AMD's driver team seriously needs to get their act together, especially the stuff that get broke after being fixed before.

yeah... i agree...
some of the things ive heard in the past couple of months made me glad im on nvidia cards atm... while there are annoying things in their drivers as well, its nothing major...