Quote Originally Posted by flyck View Post
Considering 6950 and 6970 have the same die, same tesselation and only minor differences as in less shaderclusters. i don't understand your comment :-)
Ah. Well, I am not shure what reviews you have been reading but here is the rundown.

Basically, the move to VLIW5 to VLIW4 did save ALU space on the die but AMD didn't just use this to shrink the core. Basically, they used the "saved" space and expanded upon it by adding additional SIMD engines. The engines with their associated TMUs, cache, etc naturally take up more die area than the reduction to VLIW4 allowed.

The graphics engine iteself (which contains the fixed funtion units like the tessellator) was cloned so instead of one, there are now two. This also adds to the transistor count.

Finally, there are the GPGPU compute changes that necessitated an additional direct memory access engine be added along with some other bits.

All of this of course added to the transistor count and thus increased overall TDP.