Quote Originally Posted by Solus Corvus View Post
Right, but a 5830 just has some of the cores disabled, it started life as a potential cypress chip. They could, however, make a chip that only includes 1120 shaders from the start, based on an upgraded/modified cypress architecture.
That's what I mean, Barts was designed from the get-go to be smaller. One could just as easily call it a re-designed compact-er Cypress, but one could also call it a beefed up Juniper mated to a 256-bit interface.

Most of the rumors so far pointed to a 4d design and that's what I had hoped for. But the early numbers and AMD slides have given me pause. Perhaps we won't get the 4d arch until Cayman or even 28nm. I suppose we will find out soon enough.
I think given that AMD found out about the cancellation of 32nm relatively late in the game, they decided they needed a product to fill the gap between old 40nm products and when 28nm is ready, and hence NI is going to be a half-way architecture. That is, Evergreen 4+1 shaders but the new front end

Actually that makes Cayman more interesting, because even if it isnt 4D, the fact that Cypress is (allegedly) very ineffcient despite all its functional units (its literally 2x Juniper on a single die, yet 2 x Juniper in CF beats it often), that the front-end changes might affect Cayman a lot more