AMD Cayman info (or rumor)

[zerazax]

I dunno, fake slides or not, Cayman is only ~15% bigger than Cypress. Expecting 50% more SIMD's, even if they're 10% smaller, just doesn't quite fit in 15% more - esp. when you consider you have to include TMU's for each SIMD, and that the graphics engine and ROPS all got overhauled

Granted, 15% seems too big for just 20% more SIMD's as well

Very disappointed with the specs, and WTF did ATI decrease the shader count from 1600 to 1536? WTF that doesn't make any sense.... I would have been happy if it was at 1920 like earlier rumours said, the only good thing that it comes with 2GB of VRAM.

How many times does this need to be said

1536 / 4 = 384 > 1600 / 5 = 320

So in truth, 1536 SP's will perform better than the old 1600 SP's, in everything but synthetics.. but then again, unless you're doing hardcore benching, you probably won't notice that

[Chickenfeed]

It would be ignorante to think Caymen shaders don't perform better than Cypress shaders. Shader counts alone don't tell the whole story. That said, 30-40% more performance than a 5870 with a lower shader count and similar power evelope is quite impressive if the case, those are some respectable optimizations no matter how you look at it.

[zerazax]

It would be ignorante to think Caymen shaders don't perform better than Cypress shaders. Shader counts alone don't tell the whole story. That said, 30-40% more performance than a 5870 with a lower shader count and similar power evelope is quite impressive if the case, those are some respectable optimizations no matter how you look at it.

Doubt it's the same power envelope - getting that much performance in the same node is next to impossible.

But yeah, a 30-40% jump within the same process on a die supposedly only 15% larger is a pretty impressive feat of engineering, especially if its being compared to a die 25% larger than itself

[Lightman]

Cayman will bring big improvement in front-end and that cost silicon. Shaders are just maintained at a level allowing AMD to be no slower than Cypress, but gaming performance gains will come from other major changes.

You can draw analogy between Core2Duo and i7. The execution units are just slightly modified but all the performance gains are coming from impressive front-end and un-core of CPU.

I'm expecting quite a big advantage for Cayman over Cypress in some tests. Of course this will not translate to every possible scenario, but I'm happy with that