AMD Cayman info (or rumor)

[Mechanical Man]

dude you missing the idea here. the HD5870 was a die shrink and spec wise it almost doubled the HD4870. 1600shadders compared to 800shadders, most people are going to think that means double the performance, it also had double the rops and a higher clock speed. so on paper it was twice as fast however when it came down to it the HD5870 was rarely close to being twice as fast because of the poor shadder organization and layout. it also used more power, was larger and gave off the same amount of heat compared to the 4870. and took more than a year to come out. however the HD5870 was (and still is) a great card that caused ATI to take back the fastest single GPU crown for a good while. i can't really remember much complaining about it... even by nvidia fanboys considering how the performance was good and how it brought DX11 and eyefinity to the table.

No, nVidia fans were all over how GF100 will beat 5870 to obvilion.

why are people impressed by the GTX 580? because it's out like 7 months after the GTX 480, it uses less power, puts out less heat, is smaller, is about the same price (in Canada), and is still 20% faster without a die shrink... and it OC's pretty good as well.

Thats not impressive, 10% that is clocks, that leaves ~5-15% depending on situation for full CUDA core count and improvements. I really dont see anything impressive. And 7 months.. Do you really think that in time when nVidia was trying its ass to fix GF100 they did not come with lot of ideas, but those ideas could have not been implemented in time. So they did what they could, bubblegum to get GF100 released and then work on other improvements that take acceptable time to do to try to catch AMDs lead.

on to Cayman, these leaked specs seem to confirm the rumors 1920shadders, 4D layout, 2GB of ram blah blah blah. come on AMD leak something good like a bench or something this card will be powerful but it just does not add up to have it beating the 5970. yes the shadders are better used and there is less wasted power, but a 1280SP deficit is not easy to overcome. I think if anything 6970 will end up neck and neck with the GTX 580, leading to fanboy violence from both camps, a brutal price war and smiles on all the kids faces at Christmas.

Well, performance leaves to be seen. I have no trouble adding up to 5970 performance, as you yourself said, Evergreen is very inefficient design. What do you think that Cayman is all about? its finding the right mix to get it efficient at high shader counts. I bet Barts is what it is becouse that is Evergreen designs "sweet spot".