Quote Originally Posted by STEvil View Post
lol there went the de-hype-train

sigh..
When was the last time the hype train hasn't been derailed? Especially something like the revision like gcn1 --> gcn2. Only time it has been met was a new architecture or/and a new node. And even then the its been a crap shoot.

AMD has its work cut out when their 7970 ghz needs 30 percent(when u include a larger bench suite of games, as sleeping dogs, hitman, dirt showdown skew an average of 6 games) to beat a gtx 780.

7970 ghz already consumes 250 watts of power and scaling is already being limited as more components are being added as seen between the 7970 and the 7950.

If AMD tries to increase the efficiency of the GCN cores in a utilization sense, powers going to go up like it did with the 6970 and 5870 series. If they simply add more parts, they are going to run into a utilization of those cores issue(gk110 already runs into this problem and keplar is more efficient per core for gaming as seen with the competitiveness of gk104 vs tahiti). With the 5870, they were using so little power in the first place, that they could afford the first option. But with a 7970ghz using as much power as it does, the results are going to be more limited because they are stuck on 28nm.

A 2400 core gcn at 1000 mhz is not going to outperform a 2300 core keplar unless they are willing to break some power rules which increase utilization. One of the biggest coveats of gk104 performance is the 256bit bus for memory. With both hawaii and gcn both likely running on 384 bit buses, its going to come down to core efficiency and power consumption. GCN consumes too much power at higher clocks and the cores themselves are less efficient.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/...4#.UdOaBW1u97Q

Look at this review for the gtx 760 vs an overclocked 7950. The overclocked 7950 uses 100 more watts, has a 384 bit memory bus, has 50 percent more cores, is running those cores about 10% slower than a overclocked gtx 760 but only out performs it by 5%.

For such a big monolith part, gk110 is really efficient. Efficient enough it kills the 7970 ghz for performance per watt and at the relevant revolution is on top of the performance per watt charts.

The 5870 had a massive performance per watt advantage over the gtx 480, yet its successor could not beat the fixed gtx 580. With tahiti running behind in performance(there a similar difference between a gtx 780 and 7970 ghz compared to the difference between a 5870 and gtx 580) and way behind in the performance per watt, its successor is going to have a hard time beating the gtx 780.