More bits on HD7000/Southern Islands/GCN leak
Some newish, one new data point.
Nov 17, 2011 in Channel, Desktop, Finance, Graphics, Memory, Rumors
It looks like AMD (NYSE:AMD) is planning on launching desktop HD7000 GPUs in January, and SemiAccurate just got a few more bits about them. There isn’t much new, January launch for Tahiti XT, followed by Tahiti Pro a month later, then Pitcairn XT in March, Pro in April.
The cards themselves are known as GCN (Graphics Core Next), Southern Islands, or HD7000, depending on who you talk to. All of them are made on TSMC’s 28nm process, and are cousins to the laptop lines we told you about earlier. Pricing is tentatively set for around $500 for the top Tahiti part, $400 for the Pro, $300 for Pitcairn XT, $200 for the Pro, all subject to much change and our minor but patented SPMOODT(TM)(R)(C)(P) (Source Protecting Minor Obfuscation Of Data Technology).
The new tidbit? 384-bit memory bus, that means 3GB cards. Whoopee, you can now bump the AA setting 1x more on your six 30″ 4Mp panels for Eyefinity gaming. It can’t come soon enough. Things are about to get even more silly.S|A
Update: Spelling fixes 11-17-11 9:10 pm
59 Responses to “More bits on HD7000/Southern Islands/GCN leak”
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Nov 28, 2011
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Nov 21, 2011
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Nov 18, 2011
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I wonder if in the GPU field AMD can at least show a significant speedup, instead of just a new chipdesign that runs the same old fps as the older cards, and that’s cheaper to make but won’t be sold cheaper.
Looking forward to everything running at 90+ FPS. You don’t know what your eyes have been missing until you’ve gamed on a 120hz monitor.
Are you guys sure you didnt make a mistake in the artie? New Zealand (7990) is supposed to come out in march/april… And Pitcairn was supposed to come out before Tahiti.
384bits? AMD only did a bus wider than 256bits once with the 2900; and they quickly abandoned such wide buses. AMD has NEVER put an odd-width bus (power of two*odd number) in their GPUs. That is something only nVidia has done, and if I recall their was an AMD PR slide pointing out the problems with non-power-of-2 buswidths.
Well of course an odd-width is bad according to AMD when they are not using it. Now that they will, I’m sure they will argue that they’ve found a solution to whatever problems they were pointing out before. That’s how PR works.
It was obvious this would happen sooner or later though since we can’t keep increasing clock frequencies forever as shown by modern processors, while going 512 bits would be too expensive to be worth it unless they absolutely have to.
Lots of fingers to point around…
Windows desktop is still standard 32 bit == 3gb memory limit.
Mainstream thinks 1080p is neat so 98% of monitors are 1080p or less.
XBOX still running DX9 – wtf?
Windows and 32-bit being standard? Come on, are you living under a rock for last few years?
strongly disagree on 32 bit desktop. Everyone I know runs 64 bit windows.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Windows 7 64 bit
41.28%
+0.22%
Windows XP 32 bit
17.82%
-0.65%
Windows Vista 64 bit
12.77%
+0.33%
Windows Vista 32 bit
11.74%
-0.20%
Windows 7
9.59%
-0.07%
if intel position their ivybridge to max at 24 hertz the same speed as the top console incoming soon.then intell will win the gpu war cause people will buy cheapper same spec as console power .no use buying more powerfull then topconsole since game maker on averagemake game on console first then put them on computer at about same power
game keep cpu at near 100%, rest time like now when 1,000 hz/s napper can kick in, reducing wattage 85% of time under 35 watt.
drashek wattologist….
Since I AM paying for the power bill, they’d better tune down idle power… Most of the time I’m not requiring much of my GPU at all, and having it still suck 50 W would be very very bad. Especially with a huge bus, so lots of chips etc, they’ll have a problem here. Not that Green will do much better if they come up with a 512bit bus, but still…
(no I’m not pairing it with an onboard GPU so it can shutdown… those have all but vanished since Lllama, and high-end mobos never implemented it at all)
Does 384 bit bus mean GDDR5, not XDR2? 256 bit was reported earlier, which would have implied differentially signaled RAM to achieve higher bandwidth than what we’ve seen so far, but maybe that’s not needed when you got 6 controllers.
I couldnt wait any longer for 7900 gpu, bought the gtx 580 classified 3gig one, and sell the beast and upgrade to which ever is better kepler or southern islands!
If current gpus are 100 times more powerful than current consoles then they will be 200 times more powerful when 28nm chips show up lmao.
Even mobile phones are becoming more powerful than current gen consoles (arm with dx 11 capable)? And become more powerful by the quarte. That will most like happen b4 next gen consoles.
20/22 nm where 1H”12 are in. theory : :ivybridge be pci-e3. finally, by 12 months from now, one very expensive FAST system will grace wordld.
Dats long time coming.-=8=- should pepper spray all hopes. sceamin’ MeMe & windowphon. no point till next 2011. good chance won’t fit todays 2011. like 1155 haswell is also seperate in new waitng in sidelines.haswell is supposed to be last oasis. since 2007. well, -=8=- probably make convoy trip longer, though.
No longer will saving pennies make it, Save tens & twenties. sooner than might thunk. once usb3 is final & pci-e3, there are 2 rumored varities, just to start, now & real kind with ivy. sooooo thunk aboutsit ‘gin. buy or Die world. Huamn Cruelty Knows NO bounds.
seems worlds in turmoil & Pc is NO Better. Kill Army Reserve, Occupy Army Reserve. Vote DRASHEK….
can’t wait for the 7000 series!
And by GNC you surely mean GCN, right?
People keep saying we dont need any more power, tell that to my 6950 toxic (with unlocked shaders) at 2560x 1400 in deus ex …I could do with quite a bit more power… bring on the next gen… (I’m aware it may be a badly coded console port but all games are these days, just have to live with it)
384 bits on 5500+(effective) MHz GDDR5? Thats a lotta bandwidth!
werd
the way gpu ram is going, you’d swear that asian nations are secretly buying 4kHDs already and just not shipping any abroad. ;)
If this is accurate, AMD is going after the nice 580 market, but presumably, Nvidia will push to a 512bit bus. Sadly, these prices cement the tier1/tier2 model from AMD and Nvidia, where even significant PC gaming enthusiasts are mostly expected to use the second best GPU chip from either company.
Of course, the best PC games released this year have all benefited from the current efficiencies of engines designed to run very well on the now ancient consoles. Thus, these games all run excellently on even 4850 and 9600/8800 cards, so long as the needed rez isn’t too high, and some minor high-end settings are tweaked down a little.
This means that the newest, bestest GPUs coming from AMD/Nvidia are really only essential for multi-monitor gaming- very much a minority market. By the time games are taking advantage of the performance of the next generation consoles, both companies will have released maybe two generations of new GPU families beyond those due for sale early 2012.
The irony is this- after Intel (some years back) paid software companies to artificially cripple their games on two core processors (back before Intel re-ignited their enthusiasm for two core chips via the i3), some games arriving now care more about the CPU than the GPU. Thus, a PC games player is more likely to have a poor experience because they have a two-core processor, rather than because they have what was a pretty good GPU from 2+ years ago.
Anyway, presumably, AMD’s new chips will price crash the excellent 6870 product, providing the best value AMD has offered in years- just a shame AMD’s driver support for 6870s in crossfire is so completely and totally godawful for new games.
PS- the 2-core crippling (over 4-cores) has been proven beyond a doubt, because over-clocking the two-core massively fails to fix the problem, whereas the 4-core shows the same massive advantage, even when down-clocked to very modest core frequencies. The code is literally saying “detect two cores = render at half the frame-rate”. Thankfully only a few game companies took the pay-off, and did this.
Mehh…my xfire 6870′s fly along fine thank you. Do you have proof / links to poor 6870 support ????
gets popcorn…… and waits
Do you have a reference on the Intel claim? Just curious.
“The code is literally saying ‘detect two cores = render at half the frame-rate’.”
And you’re literally saying it’s proven beyond a doubt without offering any proof.
Games like battlefield3 on the PC don’t even have DX9 code, they are pure DX10/11, so that’s certainly not completely adapted from the old DX9 consoles code.
And there are more games like that.
And don’t forget that consoles are likely in for an update in 2012 so then if you have a DX11 xbox3 and you better have a modern graphics card for the PC versions with higher resolution textures and using DX11 code.
Are we sure somebody didn’t slip last years NVIDIA roadmap to Charlie with GCN codenames slapped on it?
In other news, console developers are STILL using DX9 and these new cards are pointless for the majority of games being released.
In other news, new DX9 pc games (e.g.Witcher 2) uses huge textures that require new 2gb GPUs which happens to be DX11.
I had to play with uber sampling off with a single gtx 480 sc (witcher 2) which was an amazing game.
You raise an excellent point. I still don’t understand why the internet is full of people screaming about a CPU or GPU being a piddly 10-30% faster than another, when any of the following:
Phenom II X4 or FX or Core2Quad or Core i5/i7
6850 or 460/560
…or higher is going to net you 60+ FPS on any game you’re likely to play, on any monitor’s native resolution that you’re likely to own.
Future proofing is also incredibly stupid. Why spend extra money now hoping that something will still be viable later, when you can just build another machine at that time and have the latest tech?
For me it is very easyly to understand why some would love to be able to purchase much a faster graphic card.
I got 3 Dell U2410 monitors in a surround setup with a combined 5760×1200 resolution and my HD 6950 can only handle this amount of pixels if I play old games or drop AA.
LOL@single GPU Eyefinity setups.
A good number of us game in Eyefinity, or like to max out details and AA. My 6970 at home doesn’t really manage 60fps on *one* 1080p screen, much less 3. There’s still room for improvement.
I will admit we’re spoiled compared to the cards of yesteryear that chugged at 1024×768. But as the wheel of progress turns, so do our expectations.
I have 3 EAH 6970 and struggling with Battlefield smoothness running 3 Dell U2412M Eyefinity rig.
Maybe it’s Sandy Bridge i7-2600k with NF200 chip giving me 16x/8x/8x PCI lanes, maybe 5760 x 1200 is just a beast with today’s gen cards on decent graphics settings.
Ugg, give me faster graphics cards NOW!
Do you play BF3 at 1920×1200? Personally I like some AA AAAAAAAAAND 60+ FPS
You’re right on the money. I’ve discovered my 6850 and Phenom II X4 actually max everything, for all practical purposes. No, I’m not playing everything with 16x AA and 32X AF at 2560×1600 x3 in 3D. Thanks to the darn Xbox 360, all I know is that everything works between high and ultra.
Battelfield3
skyrim
MW3
Have you heard of some modern games? Those run 20FPs on max settings when using top of the line current graphics cards.
Plus AMD and Nvidia are moving to make the GPU much more part of computing, so a graphics card isn’t just graphics anymore.
MW3? Are you serious? A game with a codebase that traces back to Quake3? I’ll give you the others.. but one of these things just doesn’t belong
Right. MW3 is an old game. It just hide behind current post processing effects. Proof is in the textures, they are horrible. Skyrim and especially BF3 have morden textures.
So skip MW3, point is still made
And the graphic industry should wait for the game developers to catch up, right?
With that kind of logic nothing will ever change.
True, hopefully in less than 2 years directx 11 ( by then a 4 year api ) will be standard, by then well have maxwell gpu lol.
And I have Maxwell Smart shoe-phone.
AGHhhh and I just told my buddy I was going to order my new gaming rig parts this weekend. Now I have to wait another 2 months.
Side note, where’s my DDR5 motherboard and RAM?
They haven’t even released DDR4 yet.
They jumped over DDR4 in graphic cards too (from DDR2 to DDR3 to DDR5 if I remember correcly – it might have been GDR instead of DDR)
gddr4 was used by 1 family of ATI cards.
Just a note that the GDDR used on graphics cards is different from desktop DDR. GDDR3/4 are both based on DDR2, GDDR5 is based on DDR3.
Exactly. DDR5 doesn’t exist yet and GDDR5 isn’t for CPUs.
i have an old 3870 that used GDDR4
seen here: http://extreme.pcgameshardware.de/attachments/107057d1243602191-von-welchem-ati-nvidia-partner-ist-eure-grafikkarte-sapphire_radeon_hd_3870_512mb_gddr4_1x_pci_e.jpg
mine’s identical
I would guess it’s too expensive. 1GB of DDR3 is what, $5 on the spot market. If GDDR5 was that cheap, we would have 2GB cards popping up everywhere for no real price increase, but that’s not happening.
But what about the XDR2?!?? Won’t someone think of RAMBUS?
Hey James! Very good question! XDR2 will be the secret weapon of AMD. Why? Because AMD has the
license for it while Novidia does not. Novidia is
in a never ending legal clinch with Rambus for many, many years now and this is not very likely to change very soon. And here is the beef: XDR2
consumes 30% less power at twice the bandwith!
http://news.ati-forum.de/index.php/news/34-amdati-grafikkarten/2170-rambus-amds-neue-geheimwaffe-gegen-nvidia#josc2705
XDR2 is also RAMBUS IP and RAM manufacturers need to pay them to fabricate those chips, which means not all will if they set the license too high again, which means the price might go way up, which would mean AMD shot themselves in the foot.