AMD Cayman info (or rumor)

[bill_d]

The X2 cards have always come a few months after right? Trying to remember how long the 4870x2 and 5970 took after initial release

yes about two months

[safan80]

Well, that's slipped.

Cayman is still on track though. In all honestly I think AMD is just giving Nvidia their 15 minutes. Cayman is probably stronger than the 580 and 5970 by a good margin.

http://blogs.amd.com/work/fadcodenames/

“Cayman”
Market: Discrete GPUs
What is it? Second-generation DirectX® 11-capable GPU to launch in the “Northern Islands” family, will be branded AMD Radeon™ HD 69XX graphics processors.
Planned for introduction: Q4 2010

“Antilles”
Market: Discrete GPUs
What is it? AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 Series graphics card for ultra-enthusiasts that will feature two GPUs on one board.
Planned for introduction: Q1 2011

[Picao84]

From Charlie with love:

Then it was on to the demos. AMD wowed the audience with a demo of a Cayman equipped 8 core Bulldozer playing an HD video while running MS's CPU load meters. At the same time! No, really, they pulled it off! Wow!

Oh wait, that has been doable for several years now. With a 1 core machine armed with an IGP. Call me unimpressed, especially since they showed a Llano doing 5x that at AMD's TFE conference 3 weeks ago. Then again, it was new running silicon.

Do I smell harsh in his tone?

And more:

The short story is that Cayman Pro is called HD6950, Cayman XT is HD6970, and Antilles, the dual Cayman, is called HD6990. We hear three people not paying attention were actually surprised.

[Pantsu]

[kuroikenshi]

seems like my gpu upgrade will come on 2011

[spursindonesia]

Antilles slips to 2011, does it mean that AMD's confident Cayman would be good enough to compete GF110 by itself at launch ?

[kadozer]

Cayman is still on track though. In all honestly I think AMD is just giving Nvidia their 15 minutes. Cayman is probably stronger than the 580 and 5970 by a good margin.

http://blogs.amd.com/work/fadcodenames/

“Cayman”
Market: Discrete GPUs
What is it? Second-generation DirectX® 11-capable GPU to launch in the “Northern Islands” family, will be branded AMD Radeon™ HD 69XX graphics processors.
Planned for introduction: Q4 2010

“Antilles”
Market: Discrete GPUs
What is it? AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 Series graphics card for ultra-enthusiasts that will feature two GPUs on one board.
Planned for introduction: Q1 2011

Antilles slips to 2011, does it mean that AMD's confident Cayman would be good enough to compete GF110 by itself at launch ?

Might be right. Barts can hold the fort for the bulk of Xmas sales. No rush for Antilles.

[zalbard]

Antilles slips to 2011, does it mean that AMD's confident Cayman would be good enough to compete GF110 by itself at launch ?

Damn it. I hate waiting.

[Your_Boss]

Charlie has been wrong as a dog writing an actuary exam, he said reviewers were going to be picked carefully and only reviewers that bent to Nvidia's will were going to get cards, yet pretty much every reviewer out there got one. Are they all paid off now!!! The conspiracy.

I think your taking it a bit far, in terms of releases from AMD, Kyle has been one of the most positive. I think he called out NV about something a few weeks ago.

If you look at the 5970 at the moment, especially from newegg, the quantities are not exactly overflowing, 1 brand and only 1 card(besides a 1200 dollar edition).

If NV wanted to respond, like AMD did(a dirty marketing move at that), they could say these price are only temporary and the price will come back up or the 5970 won't be available for sale anymore.

I think stock of the 5970 is going to run really thin soon and that's a good thing and hopefully means cayman and antilles are coming.

The only place I see a 499 price is newegg. Provantage, Mwave and anywhere in Canada it is still 600 dollars plus. If one wanted to be a conspiracy theorist like you, one could say AMD gave a special deal to newegg, sent a memo to gtx 580 reviewers saying see, the 5970 is 499 when in reality, it is a singular deal for one card at one place.

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/dosearch_...atpromotename=

http://www.provantage.com/scripts/se...x=0&Submit.y=0

http://www.shopbot.ca/m/?m=5970

Well, Newegg is the place then to get them. I do see many other places a little higher at ~$549.99. A lot at these prices, a LOT.(See Here) Ok, so lets say the Newegg is the start of the 5970 deals. I think Newegg makes the trends in a lot of these cases.

Also, why compare a GTX580(retail $499.00, but still selling for $535.00+ in many places) I can say the same about the 580. Why ONLY compare the AMD $300.00 card to NV $500.00+ card?

Don't you think if they were going to compare cards with a $200.00 difference they could have least compared a card with $0 ~ $50.00 difference????

This is why I questions their method of testing.

Don't get me wrong, the 580 is a great card NOW. It just should have been here at least 6 months ago, maybe a year.

And just because a site says something negative about a company's card doesn't mean they're now "impartial". It just means that the card company is not looking over their shoulder at the moment. Right now NV def. has there eye on [H]. I mean look at the reviewers who DIDN'T cards. They may have done some things NV didn't like and are now on their "list".

So that's the crux, [H] compares $200.00 difference in card price, but not $50.00. Is that a fair review? If you can say yes with a straight face then..

[mutantmagnet]

He was comparing single GPU performance. It's not a good comparison in terms of money spent but it is a good way of showing if money is not as serious a concern how much performance do you get for a single gpu get set up.

[H]'s complaint has revolved around the the 480 being too expensive while remaining too closely to the 5870 in performance. For the time being the 580 will correct that flagrant faux pas until Cayman comes out.

[safan80]

Newegg's prices on the GTX 580 have spike to about $459 on the gtx580

[hurrdurr]

So 6970 will be slower than 5970?

[Vipeax]

So 6970 will be slower than 5970?

Usually/few times when the GTX580 passes the 5970 it is because of a high resolution (usually 2560x1600) with 8x AA. 1GB memory could be limiting it there.

[safan80]

So 6970 will be slower than 5970?

I would say No, the 6970 should be faster. read the wording below:

“Barts”
Market: Discrete GPUs
What is it? AMD Radeon™ HD 6800 series GPUs featuring AMD’s second-generation Microsoft DirectX® 11-capable architecture, best-in-class energy efficiency, and a feature set including AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology.
Introduced: 2010


“Cayman”
Market: Discrete GPUs
What is it? Second-generation DirectX® 11-capable GPU to launch in the “Northern Islands” family, will be branded AMD Radeon™ HD 69XX graphics processors.
Planned for introduction: Q4 2010


“Antilles”
Market: Discrete GPUs
What is it? AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 Series graphics card for ultra-enthusiasts that will feature two GPUs on one board.
Planned for introduction: Q1 2011

[hurrdurr]

But why try to read into words when the slide they made very clearly indicates that 6970 is going to be one class slower than the 5970?

[safan80]

But why try to read into words when the slide they made very clearly indicates that 6970 is going to be one class slower than the 5970?

Because it is easy to misread the slides. the arrow goes direct from the 5970 to the 6990.

[Vipeax]

Because it is easy to misread the slides. the arrow goes direct from the 5970 to the 6990.

I think your not on the same line with him. I think he means this:


If you draw it like this, it comes down to:

6990 > 5970 > 6970 > 6950 > 5870 > 6870 > 5850 > 6850 > 5770.

We know that this part is correct: 5870 > 6870 > 5850 > 6850 > 5770.
It's quite logical the rest is sorted like this too.

[safan80]

I think your not on the same line with him. I think he means this:


If you draw it like this, it comes down to:

6990 > 5970 > 6970 > 6950 > 5870 > 6870 > 5850 > 6850 > 5770.

We know that this part is correct: 5870 > 6870 > 5850 > 6850 > 5770.
It's quite logical the rest is sorted like this too.

Yeah my bad. Stupid naming scheme got me

[Vipeax]

The difference between the 5870 is damn huge compared to 6970 -> 6990/5970 -> 6990 .

[hurrdurr]

Yep. I took one step further in nerdiness and counted the actual distance in pixels between the placements. The bottom of the 5850 box and the 5870 box have a 50 pixel vertical difference, whereas 5870 and 5970 is roughly 135. We know for a fact that HD5870 is around 17 percent faster than HD5850, and HD5970 is around 55 percent faster than the HD5850. Doing the math, I can definitely say that the placements of the boxes have a very good level of precision.

So why is 6990 only slightly higher than 5970? Two possible reasons:

1. There was simply not enough space on the slide and it had to be compressed
2. This is something I have been fearing: AMD will actually respect the 300W TDP limit, which would put HD6990 and HD5970 on the same TDP, and that means any increase in performance has to come solely from improvements in Performance/Watt, which cannot be so great given both products are produced in the same node, 40nm - so 5970 and 6990's performance won't be much different.

[antiacid]

Yep. I took one step further in nerdiness and counted the actual distance in pixels between the placements. The bottom of the 5850 box and the 5870 box have a 50 pixel vertical difference, whereas 5870 and 5970 is roughly 135. We know for a fact that HD5870 is around 17 percent faster than HD5850, and HD5970 is around 55 percent faster than the HD5850. Doing the math, I can definitely say that the placements of the boxes have a very good level of precision.

So why is 6990 only slightly higher than 5970? Two possible reasons:

1. There was simply not enough space on the slide and it had to be compressed
2. This is something I have been fearing: AMD will actually respect the 300W TDP limit, which would put HD6990 and HD5970 on the same TDP, and that means any increase in performance has to come solely from improvements in Performance/Watt, which cannot be so great given both products are produced in the same node, 40nm - so 5970 and 6990's performance won't be much different.

Seeing as the 6xxx seem to overclock a bit better than the 5xxx, it's not improbable that factory oc'ed 6990's could be more than just 15-20% faster than the current 5970.

It would be a good time for amd to allow 5xxx cards to be xfire'd with 6xxx cards. If the upgrade in performance is minimal, that would be an enticing way for users to buy the new cards AND gaining a lot more performance

[kuroikenshi]

6990 xfired with 5970...... I'd be all in on that one

[hurrdurr]

Seeing as the 6xxx seem to overclock a bit better than the 5xxx, it's not improbable that factory oc'ed 6990's could be more than just 15-20% faster than the current 5970.

It would be a good time for amd to allow 5xxx cards to be xfire'd with 6xxx cards. If the upgrade in performance is minimal, that would be an enticing way for users to buy the new cards AND gaining a lot more performance

If 6970 is 225W and 6990 has to be 300W, this means an incredible amount of crippling has to be done to two 6970's. And since when you lower the frequency of a GPU its cost to you doesn't magically decrease, this would mean that AMD would be selling a card that, at stock speeds, wouldn't be much faster than a HD5970 (or even a single 6970) yet would be sold at something like $700. Everything is performance/watt when it comes to a TDP limit.

Yeah, I know, AMD will "beg us to overclock" the 6990 too, and by "overclocking" them to stock 6970 speeds we'd get a stupidly powerful graphics card; but the fact is that every review site will base its review on the stock speed, and will add "Overclocking" as merely another page among the 10 something page reviews. It will no doubt make the card look bad in performance and price.

So I don't think that would be very feasible. To me, with Antilles AMD has got two options:

1. Disregard 300W TDP and let the card overwhelmingly break single card performance and power usage records.

2. Build Antilles with 2x6870 instead of 2x6970. 2x6870 is already 12% faster than HD5970. 6870 is already 150W. Doubling it in a card will save one PCB worth of wattage, around 20W, which they can use to increase the clocks slightly to fill it to 300W and around a 15% performance difference from HD5970. The card would cost less than $500, but on the downside it wouldn't have the (possible) tessellation and DX11 tweaks the new Cayman architecture has.

[zerazax]

You guys are reading WAAYYYYYY too much into PR slides

They have those funny graphs that start at 0.8 for performance slides, why would they put them exactly in a layout like that?

I mean, reading into pixels? If so, then why is the 6850 touching the 5770 when its obvious by now the 6850 is faster?

And for that matter, why is the 5970 so much higher than the 5870 when the 5870 should be quite big compared to the 5770?

Besides, they always make their dual GPU cards look much better than in actual performance... wouldn't want to make your own drivers look bad

Also, on the fliip side, look at the 6950... it's placed higher than the 5870 so if the 6970 is 17% faster than the 6950 (like 5870 is to 5850), and we say 6950 is even a conservative 10% faster than the 5870, the 6970 is going to be close to the 580 and probably be ~ the 5970 depending on the scenario. But then, I'd be looking way too much into this slide like everyone else, so that ought to prove to you how ridiculous it is to use this to guess actual performance

If 6970 is 225W and 6990 has to be 300W, this means an incredible amount of crippling has to be done to two 6970's. And since when you lower the frequency of a GPU its cost to you doesn't magically decrease, this would mean that AMD would be selling a card that, at stock speeds, wouldn't be much faster than a HD5970 (or even a single 6970) yet would be sold at something like $700. Everything is performance/watt when it comes to a TDP limit.

Yeah, I know, AMD will "beg us to overclock" the 6990 too, and by "overclocking" them to stock 6970 speeds we'd get a stupidly powerful graphics card; but the fact is that every review site will base its review on the stock speed, and will add "Overclocking" as merely another page among the 10 something page reviews. It will no doubt make the card look bad in performance and price.

So I don't think that would be very feasible. To me, with Antilles AMD has got two options:

1. Disregard 300W TDP and let the card overwhelmingly break single card performance and power usage records.

2. Build Antilles with 2x6870 instead of 2x6970. 2x6870 is already 12% faster than HD5970. 6870 is already 150W. Doubling it in a card will save one PCB worth of wattage, around 20W, which they can use to increase the clocks slightly to fill it to 300W and around a 15% performance difference from HD5970. The card would cost less than $500, but on the downside it wouldn't have the (possible) tessellation and DX11 tweaks the new Cayman architecture has.

It's pointless to argue this - the drivers already put Antilles as 2xCayman, so using Barts is a non-sequitur

Furthermore, the 5970 was already theoretically crippled - it was 2 x Cypress XT cores clocked at Cypress PRO. AMD can take it a step further and make it 2 x Cayman PRO cores @ Cayman PRO clocks, with Cayman PRO supposed to be < 225W (my guess is in the 175-200W envelope) which would fit with a X2 configuration.

That would actually leave room for AMD to keep the higher binned XT cores to reach higher clocks and thus make the 6970 stand out even further while the ones that couldnt reach such clocks get clocked lower / have units disabled and put in the PRO and X2 config

[Vipeax]

Uh, the 6850 is touching it, but is positioned higher. Difference between the 5770 and 5870 is the same as 5870 to 5970 and it's not about % performance. It's about it's placement....