AMD Cayman info (or rumor)

[safan80]

Have you seen benchmarks of a 5970 overclocked vs a GTX480 overclocked? I don't think that GTX580 will have any problems against 5970. How it will perform against Antilles is the more important question.

Since the new rumor is antilles might not make it out this year, First the GTX 580 has to beat 5970 and then it has to be Antilles The price of the GTX 580 is too high for me to consider unless the performance is mind blowing.

[Solus Corvus]

Even if they get 40%, considering how they are not beefing up the rest of the architecture as much, it will still be an accomplishment considering they are on the same node.

How do we know what they will be doing to the rest of the architecture?

[tajoh111]

How do we know what they will be doing to the rest of the architecture?

I think AMD still wants to keep the card around 400nm and keep power reasonable. Adding twice as much memory and increase the speed is already going to add alot. 50% more shaders is going to add quite a bit as well. And if these shaders are used properly, they are probably going to consumer more watts pers shader.

[Flying duck]

^^^
Apparently AMD wants to take a risk with Cayman as Barts can hold the fort, so I'm expecting about 450mm2...

[Solus Corvus]

I think AMD still wants to keep the card around 400nm and keep power reasonable. Adding twice as much memory and increase the speed is already going to add alot. 50% more shaders is going to add quite a bit as well. And if these shaders are used properly, they are probably going to consumer more watts pers shader.

By getting rid of one shader in an group that goes mostly unused and spreading the remaining functionality between the other shaders they can increase utilization. That could result in better performance/watt to not have some mostly idle units.

I think we will have to wait and see, there is quite a lot we don't know still.

[bill_d]

How do we know what they will be doing to the rest of the architecture?

how do we know anything since the 4870's and the how many sp's war

AMD has just got better and better at keeping secrets

[kadozer]

Even Charlie is quiet. By this time he's usually writing entertaining articles.

[GoldenTiger]

Whew, didn't mean to rile people up with my response, but usually most reviews I've seen show a 25+% gap between 5870 and 480 @ 2560x1600 (which is the only resolution I really watch nowadays and have for awhile), ESPECIALLY in crossfire/sli modes with two cards it's even wider. I could be wrong, and if I am misremembering the reviews, just carry on to my next paragraph...

My figures may be off a bit, but if Cayman XT is for argument's sake 10% slower than a 580, I would expect it to be more than 10% off of the 580's price overall (more like 15-17% less) since they need a bigger incentive to settle for less (same goes for if Cayman XT is faster than the 580, of course...). The top card always carries a bigger premium in respect to price/performance, and I expect amd/nvidia will capitalize on that whichever way the pendulum swings here.

P.S. I'm in for 2 of whichever is faster... . Frankly I'd love for them to come in nearly even, and spark off some nice price cuts.

[Flying duck]

Even Charlie is quiet. By this time he's usually writing entertaining articles.

Apparently he knows the score, but he doesn't leak on AMD.
He apparently saves that for Nvidia...

[Lanek]

Yes, I know, but they got to double the specs of everything which makes up for much of the bottlenecks. The 6970 is not going to get that luxury and the biggest increase will be the number of real shaders, hence the size of the chip not reaching gtx 480.

If they can improve the performance by 50% that already shows a huge efficiency jump. I am still thinking about 40% because I think they will keep the chip under 400mm2.

I think the huge increase in efficiency can be easily noticed from the following comparison.

(double TMU, Double ROPS, Double shaders, a tad faster memory) = 44% increase.

50% increase in shaders, significantly faster memory = 40 percent in speed.

Even if they get 40%, considering how they are not beefing up the rest of the architecture as much, it will still be an accomplishment considering they are on the same node.

forget it ... you have no idea how a SP ( or how VLIW work,) and so you have no idea of what a increase of his efficient can be bring or not .... seriously this speak going to nowhere...

[kadozer]

Whew, didn't mean to rile people up with my response, but usually most reviews I've seen show a 25+% gap between 5870 and 480 @ 2560x1600 (which is the only resolution I really watch nowadays and have for awhile), ESPECIALLY in crossfire/sli modes with two cards it's even wider. I could be wrong, and if I am misremembering the reviews, just carry on to my next paragraph...

My figures may be off a bit, but if Cayman XT is for argument's sake 10% slower than a 580, I would expect it to be more than 10% off of the 580's price overall (more like 15-17% less) since they need a bigger incentive to settle for less (same goes for if Cayman XT is faster than the 580, of course...). The top card always carries a bigger premium in respect to price/performance, and I expect amd/nvidia will capitalize on that whichever way the pendulum swings here.

P.S. I'm in for 2 of whichever is faster... . Frankly I'd love for them to come in nearly even, and spark off some nice price cuts.

Don't worry about it. I know me and 2 other people were quick to reply but that's just because unlike [H] forums (http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=...ostcount=6full of sheeple and lemmings) fud is quickly corrected. Anyways you will most likely be waiting a bit longer 1-2 months at least for GTX 580 due to paper launch. Of course you can always be an early adopter and get in on the premium price in November.

[LordEC911]

I think AMD still wants to keep the card around 400nm and keep power reasonable. Adding twice as much memory and increase the speed is already going to add alot. 50% more shaders is going to add quite a bit as well. And if these shaders are used properly, they are probably going to consumer more watts pers shader.

They have reworked Cypress' MC and they are a little bit better as far as power efficiency goes. Even though it is double the memory they are double the density, supposedly, and on a lower node which should decrease power consumption slightly compared to the HD5870 2Gb models which I believe added a good ~30-40w over the stock HD5870. Obviously having 2Gb will increase power consumption but it wouldn't be as much as last gen's 2Gb versions.

My figures may be off a bit, but if Cayman XT is for argument's sake 10% slower than a 580, I would expect it to be more than 10% off of the 580's price overall (more like 15-17% less) since they need a bigger incentive to settle for less (same goes for if Cayman XT is faster than the 580, of course...). The top card always carries a bigger premium in respect to price/performance, and I expect amd/nvidia will capitalize on that whichever way the pendulum swings here.

I would expect GTX580 and Cayman to at least be trading blows, since Cayman was targetting +10-15% on a full specced GTX480 w/ 512SPs. So even if they miss the mark a bit or GTX580 gets a bit more performance, there shouldn't be a huge difference in performace. I just hope that they will have Cayman Pro at or slightly above GTX480 levels of performance.

[spursindonesia]

One thing to ponder about, if GTX 580 is gonna be so wonderful and HD 6970 is gonna suck, i just can't help thinking why nVidia would launch it about 2 weeks sooner than its rival. It would be a total PR victory if you can launch a product that tops competitor's just launched product, the HALO effect would be fantastic, sudden comeback FTW. But i digress, perhaps Cayman does suck and nVidia have a pile of GTX 580 in warehouse begging to be released, we'll see.

[zerazax]

One thing to ponder about, if GTX 580 is gonna be so wonderful and HD 6970 is gonna suck, i just can't help thinking why nVidia would launch it about 2 weeks sooner than its rival. It would be a total PR victory if you can launch a product that tops competitor's just launched product, the HALO effect would be fantastic, sudden comeback FTW. But i digress, perhaps Cayman does suck and nVidia have a pile of GTX 580 in warehouse begging to be released, we'll see.

Interesting point. GTX 580 was kept very secret til less than a month before release, so its also possible they were waiting to release something quickly to stem the tide

Given that it looks pretty much like it's what the GTX 480 should've been months ago, it's possible

[tajoh111]

One thing to ponder about, if GTX 580 is gonna be so wonderful and HD 6970 is gonna suck, i just can't help thinking why nVidia would launch it about 2 weeks sooner than its rival. It would be a total PR victory if you can launch a product that tops competitor's just launched product, the HALO effect would be fantastic, sudden comeback FTW. But i digress, perhaps Cayman does suck and nVidia have a pile of GTX 580 in warehouse begging to be released, we'll see.

I have the opposite feeling. If they are going to launch it, launch it early, even if they have no quantities to sell. That way the hype of the 6970 is derailed because it can no longer claim fastest GPU crown.

If NV had crap loads of cards to sell I could understand your reasoning(as they want to sell a crap load of cards before the 6970 comes out), but it sounds like quantities are horrendous. So NV is not launching this card early to make money obviously. I think launching such a low quantity product is to just steal your competitors fanfare.

This release is a pure marketing move. If the 6870 was launched before the gtx 460, the release of the gtx 460 would have been a crazy disappointment.

I think you have to ask yourself? Why would NV release a card that not going to be for sale immediately ahead of it competitor if at the very least it didn't beat it. Their is no logical reason to release it later.

[zerazax]

I have the opposite feeling. If they are going to launch it, launch it early, even if they have no quantities to sell. That way the hype of the 6970 is derailed because it can no longer claim fastest GPU crown.

If NV had crap loads of cards to sell I could understand your reasoning(as they want to sell a crap load of cards before the 6970 comes out), but it sounds like quantities are horrendous. So NV is not launching this card early to make money obviously. I think launching such a low quantity product is to just steal your competitors fanfare.

This release is a pure marketing move. If the 6870 was launched before the gtx 460, the release of the gtx 460 would have been a crazy disappointment.

I think you have to ask yourself? Why would NV release a card that not going to be for sale immediately ahead of it competitor if at the very least it didn't beat it. Their is no logical reason to release it later.

Well, then why didn't Nvidia do so with Fermi v1.0? It works both ways here

[highoctane]

Well, then why didn't Nvidia do so with Fermi v1.0? It works both ways here

I would say because now they have an established product ready for market even if in limited numbers vs the challenges brought about in just getting v1.0 out of the labs and into the market. I mean we got A3 silicon on gf100, everything since has been A1 silicon hasn't it.

[tajoh111]

Well, then why didn't Nvidia do so with Fermi v1.0? It works both ways here

Because it wasn't ready at all(the card was a mess of wires until the beginning of the year) and reviews would not be the most positive(it wasn't really positive as it was), early models of the card were hitting 500-600mhz, sending such a disastrous card to reviewers would only make AMD look good as the 5870 would have been faster. The only reason NV would release it early is to get positive reviews, otherwise you would just be hyping your competitors up.

What would you think would happen if NV released a early gtx 480 release and it performed 10 percent less while consuming way more power? That's the answer to your question.

Even with the current edition of the gtx 480, considering what the card is, it was released to early and should have been fixed before it came out.

You could say the gtx 480 has a very beta feel to it and was released too early as quantities were bad and their was some obvious flaws in the chip design(no card should have a hole for cooling).

[spursindonesia]

I have the opposite feeling. If they are going to launch it, launch it early, even if they have no quantities to sell. That way the hype of the 6970 is derailed because it can no longer claim fastest GPU crown.

If NV had crap loads of cards to sell I could understand your reasoning(as they want to sell a crap load of cards before the 6970 comes out), but it sounds like quantities are horrendous. So NV is not launching this card early to make money obviously. I think launching such a low quantity product is to just steal your competitors fanfare.

This release is a pure marketing move. If the 6870 was launched before the gtx 460, the release of the gtx 460 would have been a crazy disappointment.

I think you have to ask yourself? Why would NV release a card that not going to be for sale immediately ahead of it competitor if at the very least it didn't beat it. Their is no logical reason to release it later.

It can go both ways, like Zerazax suggested & i admitted.

Perhaps nVidia do have a clear winner in their hand and want to make a headline first with the new ace, OTOH, if you have a loser card vs upcoming competitor card, don't you want to give it the best light by releasing it first so it won't have to deal with its conqueror and instead walking all over its old nemesis (HD 5870) ?

Either way, it doesn't really matter in the end, since the release dates aren't too far off beetween them, as consumer, just wait till the dust clear & prices settle, then pick the one that suit your needs & preferences best. I think we all can agree on that.

[tajoh111]

It can go both ways, like Zerazax suggested & i admitted.

Perhaps nVidia do have a clear winner in their hand and want to make a headline first with the new ace, OTOH, if you have a loser card vs upcoming competitor card, don't you want to give it the best light by releasing it first so it won't have to deal with its conqueror and instead walking all over its old nemesis (HD 5870) ?

Either way, it doesn't really matter in the end, since the release dates aren't too far beetween them, as consumer, just wait till the dust clear & prices settle, then pick the one that suit your needs & preferences best. I think we all can agree on that.

It wouldn't only have the best light if they had card to sell. By the time the gtx 580 becomes commercially available, if cayman xt is as good as some of you think, the hype would be gone and for naught.

I agree it is nice to have an idea of performance when they are released so close to each other(NV's is more of a performance preview), so we can wait and see without each other company jerking the consumer around and waiting for disappointment(fermi gf100).

[zerazax]

It wouldn't only have the best light if they had card to sell. By the time the gtx 580 becomes commercially available, if cayman xt is as good as some of you think, the hype would be gone and for naught.

Didn't hurt them all that much when GTX 280 came out and a week later the 4870 made its $649 tag look like a joke

[tajoh111]

Didn't hurt them all that much when GTX 280 came out and a week later the 4870 made its $649 tag look like a joke

Hurt who? The release and price of the 4870 was a nightmare for Nvidia. ATI crashed NV party and worse, with quite the quantity of cards. AMD plans for a card really didn't change course. This if anything demonstrates how you can kill a launch with the right product.

If you mean didn't hurt AMD, of course it didn't. AMD plans were just reinforced by the outrageous pricing of the gtx 280. This is a different scenario for NV though as they have no cards to sell, just cards that can be used as marketing tools. Releasing a completely inferior product that can be used only for marketing at this point in time would be simply pointless.

It would be better to spin and not release a card at all(just say a card is coming, like they did with the gtx 480) to hold back sales of cayman. They can't do this if gf110 is released already and people already know its performance.

Giving performance details when your card is not released yet and your competitors card are out with quantity is like showing your cards at the first turn on poker. Your just giving your competitors the advantage because people will know whether to wait for the cards or not. I think NV has confidence at this point on the performance of gf110 to pull such a movie.

If NV cards is 600 dollars and cayman xt is 500 and faster, NV would have just done AMD a favor. Worse yet, you didn't even sell any cards before the arrival of the cayman xt because you didn't have any. That just sounds like a notoriously dumb marketing move and would just help AMD.

One more thing that has lead me to believe NV is not completely screwed anymore is their stock.

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2010/1...es-downgrades/

It has been upgraded from neutral to buy by analysts and the stock has risen 20% in the last month too.

If NV was completely screwed, I don't think this would be the case.

[saaya]

The price of the GTX 580 is too high for me to consider unless the performance is mind blowing.

you mean as in 3x faster than we need? ^^

seriously, whoever NEEDS that performance is gaming at 2560x1600+ or 1920x1080+ 3D, and if you can afford a display for 500-1000$ then youd have a weird sense of value if you consider 550$ for a vga to feed that display too much...

i think the real dealbreaker for both nvidia and ati right now is the lack of killer apps, ie games, plus the high cost of 24"+ displays... if displays were cheaper AND/OR there would be at least 2 kick 4ss games that NEED a highend gpu to be maxed out, highend would actually sell some actual volume and not be a corporate e-peen contest

Whew, didn't mean to rile people up with my response, but usually most reviews I've seen show a 25+% gap between 5870 and 480 @ 2560x1600

what reviews?

normalized there is a 10% difference on average according to tpu
http://tpucdn.com/reviews/Zotac/GeFo...rfrel_2560.gif

anandtech 2560x1600 max:

0% difference in BFBC2
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33205.png

~5% difference in Wolfenstein
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33236.png

~10% difference in crysis warhead
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33215.png

~10% difference in metro2033
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33230.png

~15% difference in dirt2
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33221.png

~20% difference in hawx
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33224.png

~20% difference in ME2
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33227.png

~30% difference in civ5 (no driver tweaking yet from ati i think)
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33212.png

~30% difference in Stalker CoP
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33233.png
(unplayable on either one, at playable settings the difference is only ~20%)
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33232.png

~30% difference in battleforge (why is it in dx10 and not 11?)
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph3987/33209.png

thats 16-17% difference between the 5870 and the 480 on average according to anandtech, which i think chose a very good selection of games...

the 480 has MUCH better min fps than the 5870 and 68xx... but av fps is in no way 25% faster on average, and 25%+ on average, thats just ridiculous man, i wanna see those reviews
n-zone? ^^

[zerazax]

what reviews?

been waiting for that answer since April

Hurt who? The release and price of the 4870 was a nightmare for Nvidia. ATI crashed NV party and worse, with quite the quantity of cards. AMD plans for a card really didn't change course. This if anything demonstrates how you can kill a launch with the right product.

If you mean didn't hurt AMD, of course it didn't. AMD plans were just reinforced by the outrageous pricing of the gtx 280. This is a different scenario for NV though as they have no cards to sell, just cards that can be used as marketing tools. Releasing a completely inferior product that can be used only for marketing at this point in time would be simply pointless.

That depends on how much Nvidia actually knows what AMD is doing. Seeing as how tight lipped AMD was with Barts and Cayman, my bet is that Nvidia doens't know much.

But Nvidia DOES know that if Cayman beats the GTX 480, they may very well have no answer besides the 580, which looks mostly like the full GF100 with process improvements.

Basically, for Nvidia, it's either release the card and at least make some money, or not release it at all and make no money. It's pretty obvious which choice is the best.

It would be better to spin and not release a card at all(just say a card is coming, like they did with the gtx 480) to hold back sales of cayman. They can't do this if gf110 is released already and people already know its performance.

Giving performance details when your card is not released yet and your competitors card are out with quantity is like showing your cards at the first turn on poker. Your just giving your competitors the advantage because people will know whether to wait for the cards or not. I think NV has confidence at this point on the performance of gf110 to pull such a movie.

Not releasing the card at all would only hurt share holders. You've already sunk cost into researching the card, and since this card is likely based on the full GF100, it makes no sense not to release it after you've spent all this time trying to fix GF100 to have the full 512 units.

And who's to say how many GTX 580's Nvidia actually has? The only paper launch rumors out there are from a few sources. In all likelihood, Nvidia has enough to get some buyers, especially the die hard Nvidia fans, and generate buzz. Plus, being a 5xx generation, even if it's just a rebrand, makes money with OEMs and wins points from less knowledgeable shareholders.

And you aren't giving the competitors any advantage if your competitor is tight-lipped about performance. Now, this may well be a repeat of GT200/RV770 - if GTX 580 performance is underwhelming, AMD may push Cayman out (or at least leaks out) earlier, just like RV770 where they saw that the 4850/4870 more than beat its expectations and we saw reviews authorized for release a week before they were supposed to be.

If NV cards is 600 dollars and cayman xt is 500 and faster, NV would have just done AMD a favor. Worse yet, you didn't even sell any cards before the arrival of the cayman xt because you didn't have any. That just sounds like a notoriously dumb marketing move and would just help AMD.

Again, you're assuming Nvidia has none in stock. There's clearly pictures of people with them for reviews, so the card does exist. And pricing it at 600 dollars then lowering it to 400 once Cayman hits, if Cayman is faster, is nothing that Nvidia hasn't done before.

We ARE talking about the company that rebranded G92 130598130980158 times, the same one who is naming this the 580 when it's looking like its more of a 485... you don't think they'd do something like this?

One more thing that has lead me to believe NV is not completely screwed anymore is their stock.

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2010/1...es-downgrades/

It has been upgraded from neutral to buy by analysts and the stock has risen 20% in the last month too.

If NV was completely screwed, I don't think this would be the case.

Stocks hardly mean anything. Everyone bought stock before the release of GTX 280 thinking it was going to be great, and it went downhill. How many investors actually know what the 580 is going to be about? Or what AMD's plans are? Few to begin with. Now how many know both?

Edit: One last point

Remember those GTX 580 performance slides from Nvidia PR? They're being benched against the GTX 480, the 6870, and the 5870.

Now imagine if the 6970's already out on the market. What does Nvidia PR do if Cayman is significantly better? Can Nvidia still say "fastest GPU on the market?" Of course not, it would be an utter PR disaster, and ultimately hurt your relations with shareholders. Everyone knows those PR slides (starting at 80%) are complete BS, but they please shareholders.

Frankly, the safe thing to do is release this card early, because if you release it late, you run into Fermi 2.0's scenario - late to the game, and possibly underwhelming. Release it early, and at least you can claim you've got the fastest GPU, even if it lasts only 10 days

[flopper]

There has to be some negatives, there are rarely changes that only result in positives. Increased power consumption is already one.

I think your assuming everything is shader limited and there will be a linear increase in performance with shader increase. This has been proven wrong almost entirely this generation.


AMD this time is going to at best increase performance by 50% because there is only a 50% increase in real shaders. There is a big but this time around.

Much of the purpose of changing to a new architecture again, is trying to make those spec gains linear again.

AMD is trying to balance DP, Tesselation and keeping shaders fed is a priority due to the lack of efficiency on cypress.
AMD is lacking tesselation output and DP power for their professional setup.
Cayman will be a good balanced card with shader and geometry output.

When it does, I'll sig you.

Andy warhol once said, being famous is 15 minutes in the spotlight.

Nvidas Fermi beats AMD with tesslation which for people who dont understand it is the future of gaming on the PC, due to tesselation we can increase eyecandy while keeping fps high.
We are talking better than crysis 1 and 2 graphics here and better frames per second with tesselation than crysis 1 and 2.

Now, AMD or rather, Richard Huddy states, well our cards have enough tess (damage control) with image/fps quality.(not true)

A game developer thinks, Gee, tessselation allows me to build a cheaper set of textures, due to less time is needed to create the art assest, but they have to build for people who can run the game, which isnt the case with 4800 series from amd, not with their 5800 series and not their 6800 series.

Maybe the adress this in their 6900 series, but then its a 400+us cash game. For that you can buy both a xbox360 and a ps3 with motion gaming for the family.

Fermi is unbalanced card for the moment, the 580gtx shows how its done and it is still on 40nm, with 28nm they be rocking due to what they have learned from their implementation and yes, they still build big chips.
Faster dosnt allow small.

Its like guys and their e-penis, if its big and powerful they feel really good about themself, if its small and efficient they can fool themselves until they met a girl, who knows big and powerful when she see one.

In the technology you need money and resources, Intel got those in spades so does Nvidia.
AMD is still a low budget company with horrible marketing.

People dont buy that often with wellinformed decisions, they buy from benchmarks and just walking into the store buying a computer.
They buy what they know off and it isnt AMD.

Intel inside, the way it meant to be played with NVidia.
Now, where is AMD in that arena?
Nowhere....