Soldato
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Don't know if Ati will get away with just a refresh as Nvidia must be able to improve on fermi by then.
I wouldnt be suprised, we went from rumours of a total new AMD arch, to, a hybrid to a sort of refinement. Fermis performance no doubt relaxed the ATi development schedule I would imagen, no sense straining a new chip that isnt nescesary. Though as above, new arch doesnt = second coming of christ, still I think AMD are taking there foot of the gas so to speak.
I m going out on a limb and saying this is the gpu that will really break nvidia. All they have to do is scale up the 5000 series, no pressure, its not like they need to respond to nvidia.
If they do manage to make the design more efficient by a significant amount. Green team will be in massive trouble.
They have a lot of room to play with. Add £100 to die cost, 20% to die size, 20C to peak thermals, higher power draw, better cooler, tack on the features nvidia has i.e. 3d, cuda and physx, and what are you left with? 5870 isnt far off a 480, what would a chip that really pushed the limits ati so far have only touched do. And any complaints, they can just point at nvidia and say 'they did it first'.
It boggles me how anyone can still say fermi is a great architecture- if they are going to claim anything they should say ATI were not ambitious enough, had they gone all out and released a 5890, with bigger die, hotter and higher cost...the 480 would have been utterly slain.
thinq.co.uk said:Rather than offering a revolutionary new GPU architecture, the site describes the new line of GPUs as a "refresh" of the Radeon HD 5000-series GPUs, and says that the new GPUs will focus more on efficiency improvements than cramming in more stream processors.
No, 32nm failing is what changed AMD's plans.
GF100 is a great architecture - it was just never designed for 40nm and too much got butchered shoe horning it in. They can actually double the performance in many key areas without a huge increase in complexity or die size but unfortunatly thats about as possible on 40nm as doubling the number of SPs would be.
Theres a reason why they said this when it comes to the ATI architecture also:
GF100 is a great architecture - it was just never designed for 40nm and too much got butchered shoe horning it in. They can actually double the performance in many key areas without a huge increase in complexity or die size but unfortunatly thats about as possible on 40nm as doubling the number of SPs would be.
Theres a reason why they said this when it comes to the ATI architecture also:
Here is how I see the future of high end.
I had strongly debated waiting for the "southern Islands" 6k series of cards which comes out late this fall. With no price pressure from Nvidia I expect 6k prices will be high probably 350$- 6850 and 450$- for 6870. Current gen probably drop to 5850-200$ and 5870-250$'ish.
6k series are hybrid of 5800 and the future architecture 7800 but still at 40nm. For the 6k cards I expect at most 30-40% performance increase over 58xx but with plus 20% power. They are meant as a stopgap because of the cancellation of TSMC and GF 32nm process.
Global foundries 28nm is doing well and Northern Islands might be another September launch in 2011. I expect low and mid range cards at 28nm in early-mid 2011.
My plan is to use my cheap 5870 to skip 6k series and hold on until the true next gen 28nm architecture 7k series comes in late 2011. If 7k gets delayed I will probably add a second 5870 for then about 150$ and hold on through the extra fall-winter-spring months when crossfire is doable for me.
In short If you care about noise and power like I do then Nvidia is in a ditch for awhile like Intel was with "press-hott" 65nm P4. The 6k wont blow away the 5800 on price or performance and the next die shrink and new arch is almost a year and half away. So unless you are a super serious gamer a good deal on a 58xx series will hold you fine for sometime.
-that no 6k cards were seen at computex means either a very late fall launch for 6k or that ATI is locked down regarding 6k and really trying to leave Nvidia in the dark in an attempt to catch them off-guard with launch numbers.
wonder how much improvement these will have over the current top-crop of 5000 series, performance wise.
ATI will be looking to put a clear gap between them and the three Fermi cards while increasing on the yeilds over the 5000 cards.
I think the Southern Islands hybrid core might be a lot better than people are expecting it to be.