AMD Cayman info (or rumor)

[zerazax]

I see you guys have another view, but tha's fine with me. Different views will help us all to undrestand this better. I have another view, and I hope you guys can respect it, as I respect yours.

nVidia's new move to prepare GTX570 seams to be a preperation against 6970 too. The timing suggest that strongly.

I've also been talking about these delays as a possiable indication of perforamnce-truble in AMD-camp.

I may be wrong, but I think a few facrors are indication that AMD is truble to deliver nessesory performance to beat/match GTX580. We will find out soon, no need to agree on evrything right now.

The issue here with your premise is that there's no logical place to put Cayman.

Where would the 570 be? If rumors are correct, its a cut down 480 SP version of GF110, and is likely clocked lower than the 580, so it'll be placed ~ GTX480 performance. Makes sense, the 480 is supposed to be EOL, and you wouldn't want the 570 being too close to the 580, so it'll likely follow the 470 vs. 480.

Now, if you place the 570 there, you say its meant to counter the 6970...

But that would say the 6970 is ~ GTX 480 performance, which means its only ~16-20% faster than the 5870.

Then where does the 6950 go? The 6870 is already nipping on the tails of the 5870 (lets say 10%), so the 6950 certainly would have to be slotted higher, especially if AMD wants to make any sense of return on a cut down Cayman chip.

In that case, lets say 6950 is in a worst case scenario only 15-20% faster than the 6870 - reasonable given that Cayman is at least Cypress size.

However, that would mean the 6950 is only 5-10% faster than the 5870, and thus is only 10-15% slower than the 6970 which is at 480 performance.

Which again, is way way way too close for how AMD has ever slotted their cards - even the 5770 and 5850 had very sizeable performance differences.

A great chart for performance summary this is here from Xbitlabs

The ONLY way Cayman is going to have these numbers is if AMD decided to rest on their laurels and made Cayman only a minor refresh, which none of the evidence points - and in fact which contradicts your initial premise that AMD is having trouble with a high end performance GPU.

And even if its a minor refresh, all the worst case scenarios would have to occur ALL together to even be within the same ballpark as what you are suggesting.

Now if you had said the 6970 is somewhere between 480 and 580, and 6950 somewhere between 5870 and 6970, and that the 570 would be somewhere between the 6950 and 6970, I'd say that's a very conservative guess, but one that is reasonable and would mirror the GF100 vs. Cypress numbers.

Thus, this isn't a matter of "agreeing" or "disagreeing" - it's pointing out that your original argument's logic is completely incorrect and you're bringing arguments here that are incompatible with the reality of the situation