Amd Volcanic Islands details

[LordEC911]

Bigger chip, expanded power-states, higher frequencies (if Bonaire, and Cypress ---> Cayman are any guide) My guess: 5.2 billion transistors, 2688 cores and 440mm2

Think more with transistor count. I estimate, depending on the exact die size but assuming around 440mm2, around 5.5b-6b.

You have to understand that cutting down GPGPU is a choice made by Nvidia. GK110 is better at GPGPU than anything AMD has to offer right now; the thing is, Nvidia makes a lot of money on professional GPU segment (unlike AMD), so they cripple gaming GPUs on purpose to get people who do need GPGPU performance to spend more.

Once there is sufficient demand for gaming GPGPU performance, I am sure they will step up.

This is very unfortunate, but there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. It's their business model.


Not happening, would increase die size and PCB cost too much. Not really feasible.

I think, though you did mention it, he was specifically talking about gaming compute performance, possibly OpenCL?
They didn't remove any of that for GK110 dies and they still are getting beat by Tahiti.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6973/n...-780-review/18
Possibly driver related?

512b is possible by using a more area efficient PHY like in Bonaire/Pitcairn but lower speed would easily give +300Gbps of bandwidth while decreasing the area of the PHY by a third or about 66% the size of Tahiti's total PHY. There is also the comment that Stilt made about a rectangular die which suggests they are looking to maximize the perimeter.
We already know that Hawaii has a more complex PCB than Tahiti, more layers, so that could hint at either faster memory speeds(7Gbps) or a larger bus(512b) or just more power.