AMD to launch Volcanic Islands GPU (HD8000s) in 2013

[raghu78]

The issue here is that AMD publicly said they won't have anything to replace their high end cards this year. To me, that holds more truth than rumors.

As it stands now, NVIDIA is essentially AT LEAST a half generation ahead of AMD. AMD needed a refresh which is something that should have happened five months ago. Instead, they will suddenly find themselves competing against refreshed NVIDIA cards that will walk all over them, necessitating price cuts.

To make matters worse, if AMD can't achieve at least a 75% performance increase over Tahiti XT with the next generation, NVIDIA won't even need Maxwell. They'll just reduce the price of TITAN, release a fully enabled GK110 and wait until Maxwell is fully baked.

And let's not forget AMD's track record on launches. We have constantly seen them release a card to reviewers only to make it available weeks or sometimes even months later. So Q4 2013? In the world of AMD launches, that means absolutely, positively nothing.

Nvidia products based on GK110 are not going to be competing with AMD products. GTX 780 and Titan are in a different class of perf and price. obviously you should know more details on exact pricing but I expect GTX 780 to be around USD 650. GTX 770 based on GK104 will go head on with HD 7970 Ghz. thats a close battle. even when your consider both cards overclocked they are going to trade blows. GTX 760 Ti will have a much easier time against HD 7950 boost. AMD needs a 1 Ghz HD 7950 without any clock throttling to compete against a 1.1 Ghz GTX 760 Ti.

Because AMD skipped a Tahiti refresh Nvidia has no competition in the USD 500+ single GPU market. dual GPU products like HD 7990 should be competitive with the July frame pacing driver. but make no mistake AMD has never had two generations were they were behind significantly. after the HD 2900XT generation their response was aggressive with the HD 4870 / HD 4850. AMD has chosen to prioritize resources in difficult times. But you can count on a strong response with Volcanic Islands. Historically AMD has been first to new memory technologies as they are the driver behind the latest GDDR technology. A GDDR6 based Volcanic Islands product will be able to match the bandwidth of Tahiti / GK110 with a 256 bit memory controller at 9 - 10 Ghz. That would allow more shader power to be fitted into a given die size / TDP.

also a 75% faster product than HD 7970 Ghz is excellent and quite frankly very difficult on a 350 sq mm die at 20nm. Titan is roughly 33% faster than HD 7970 Ghz. a fully enabled Titan with 7.5% more shader power would be 40% faster. At 1.75x a Volcanic Islands chip will be 25% faster than a fully enabled Titan (1.4 x 1.25 = 1.75). such a jump from 28nm to 20nm is outstanding as the jump from 40nm to 28nm included transition to high k metal gate which provided better than historical gains in transisitor efficiency. the expectations for 20nm are quite low. thats also one of the primary reasons for TSMC to go to 16nm FINFET a year after 20nm launch.

http://www.cadence.com/Community/blo...hnologies.aspx

" While TSMC has four "flavors" of its 28nm process, there is one 20nm process, 20SoC. "20nm planar HKMG [high-k metal gate] technology has already passed risk production with a very high yield and we are preparing for a very steep ramp in two GIGAFABsTM," Sun said. Sun noted that 20SoC uses "second generation," gate-last HMKG technology and uses 64nm interconnect. Compared to the 28HPM process, it can offer a 20% speed improvement and 30% power reduction, in addition to a 1.9X density increase"

if AMD hit 1.75x of HD 7970 Ghz with the HD 9970 and stay around 350 sq mm they would have done extremely well. Maxwell GM104 doubling GK104 perf at similar die size / TDP will also be difficult. even 1.75x would be a huge achievement.