Amd Volcanic Islands details

[raghu78]

I just want to remind everyone about what countless posts were saying months ago about Volcanic Islands. We were shouted down and accused of being fanboys for not going along with the preposterous rumors (20nm anyone?). Now, those dissenting voices are pretty quiet, yes?

Hawaii was always 28nm and this was known by anyone who knows a bit about TSMC. if you followed TSMC earnings calls for Q1 2013 and Q2 2013, they were initially talking of 20nm volume production in Q2 2014. In the Q2 2013 call they were vague saying they cannot say about 20nm volume production in Q2 2014.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost...&postcount=133

But I would like to remind you that you were extremely vocal about AMD not having a high end GPU in 2013. and here we are seven months after Titan and four months after the GTX 780 launch and AMD has a solid answer with R9 290X. To remind you the GTX 480 launched 6 months after HD 5870. these gaps in timing happen in the high tech industry.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...-in-2013/page3

this was even after AMD was hinting at the 28nm Volcanic Islands GPU product refresh in Q4 2013

http://www.rage3d.com/articles/hardware/amd_worldcast/

I understand Hawaii is the only completely new GPU while the others are tweaks of existing ASICs. something like what Nvidia did with the GTX 700 series. nonetheless AMD has refereshed their stack with better performance at every price point and look to provide very good competition to Nvidia for the next 9 - 12 months. Also 20nm GPU products are most likely Q3 2014 with real volume being in Q4 2014 as Apple likely eats up the initial wafers for their A8 chips.

I am looking forward to your opinion on R9 290 / R9 290X in a couple of weeks and especially BF4 Mantle in Dec. I believe Nvidia have been out thought by AMD. the sweep of the next gen consoles and the close collaboration with DICE on Mantle are all indicators to an AMD firing on all cylinders and leveraging their console wins to the best effect.