AMD HD7XXX Discussion Thread

[Revolution]

@XTechManiac

Yup. Check the performance of the latest 11.6 catalyst drivers:- AMD Catalyst 11.6 Windows 7 Driver Analysis :: TweakTown USA Edition Very positive feedback.

HD7000 will be a beast. Can’t wait for 28nm.

AMD never care about older card…

No improvement for older series cards with new driver in most of the cases.

[user67]

AMD never care about older card…

No improvement for older series cards with new driver in most of the cases.

THe HD5870 receives a boost dude please check before commenting.

How can you expect AMD to continue magically increase performance of very old cards like HD3k and HD4k?

THeir drivers are mature already and besides, they are DX10.1 cards. We are mainly seeing improvements in brand new games and DX11 titles (and far cry 2)..

I remember when the final driver was released before HD5k launch. GOd, HD4890 received a tremendous boost in performance with that.

[Tao]

AFAIK, Southern Isles is just going to be a bigger Cayman (VLIW4) on TSMC 28nm , and launch will depend on the yields of the TSMC 28nm process. Hopefully th

ey’ll go for a 384 bit bus and better compute (OpenCL 2.0 will do) functionality

As noted in the AT article, GCN is still under development, and Southern Isles have been taped out already , HD8000 might be the first chip to use that architecture

I am looking on for a battle of the cards sometime in November-December timeframe, with so many wonderful gaming titles (tes v , bf 3 , rage ) expected, it should be real exciting to have these new cards

[user67]

AMD Southern Islands possible for September | SemiAccurate

Kepler 28nm taped out

[Hades1]

AMD Southern Islands GPU Codenames Surface | techPowerUp

[satyanjoy]

so what is the key features of 7XXX series for gamer in layman’s language ?

[YoGi-Sama]

^ Ideally, not much new features per se. I think this will mostly comprise of tuning and enhancing current VLIW4/Cayman architecture, deploying updated Cayman architecture across the lineup top-to-bottom (Currently on 69xx series utilizes this, 68xx is still VLIW5, and 67xx and below are mostly rabadged/tweaked counterparts of their 5000 series equivalents), Better thermal and power envelopes and possibly 28nm process.

[memnom]

28nm process is confirmed, thats why its taking AMD so long to launch this refresh. The VLIW4 would be highly optimized and AMD is looking to do away with VLIW and bring in the SIMD, although not in this refresh [link].

In complete layman’s terms (incl me), the 28nm process will allow more shader units to be crammed inside the silicon which would result in higher frame rates across the board and since it is 28nm and HKMG process u can expect even lower power consumption and relatively lower heat output.

As mentioned in the Anandtech article, this is just a refresh where AMD is trying to do everything right which might just benefit the gamer to a great extent.

[user67]

Well, semiaccurate reports HD7k got taped out in 28nm back in February, putting an expected launch date in 2 months from now.

[satyanjoy]

@memnom

28nm process is confirmed, thats why its taking AMD so long to launch this refresh. The VLIW4 would be highly optimized and AMD is looking to do away with VLIW and bring in the SIMD, although not in this refresh [link].

In complete layman’s terms (incl me), the 28nm process will allow more shader units to be crammed inside the silicon which would result in higher frame rates across the board and since it is 28nm and HKMG process u can expect even lower power consumption and relatively lower heat output.

As mentioned in the Anandtech article, this is just a refresh where AMD is trying to do everything right which might just benefit the gamer to a great extent.

wow.,luv these three things >>

1. higher frame rates

2.lower power consumption

3.relatively lower heat output.

that means we will get better FPS in lower card,so cost per frame will be decreased

[memnom]

Thats kinda arguable, but yes the VLIW4 will be present in almost all of the cards except the HTPC ones. But as it was already mentioned. the GCN would be the real slam dunk if it makes into the SIs which is highly obscure at this point.

[Hades1]

AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series to be PCI-Express 3.0 Compliant

Source: AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series to be PCI-Express 3.0 Compliant | techPowerUp

[Hades1]

AMD Says Radeon HD 7000 GPUs Are on Track for 2011 Launch - Softpedia

[baccilus]

Great news Hades

[nanoneo]

Here hoping the launch will bring a price vut on the 6xxx series.

[satyanjoy]

@nanoneo

Here hoping the launch will bring a price vut on the 6xxx series.

hoping the same here..

[The_Knight]

AMD’s Upcoming Radeon HD 7900 GPUs May Use XDR2 Rambus Memory

In the last quarter of 2011, AMD is expected to launch its first 28nm graphics cards from the Radeon HD 7000 product series, and the latest leaks to reach the Web suggest that the top parts from this range may use AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture and high-speed XDR2 memory from Rambus.

According to Expreview, the launch of the Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards family will resemble that of the current Radeon HD 6000 solutions, as AMD will first introduce a couple of mainstream solutions into the market.

These will be the first graphics cores developed by the company to be built using the 28nm fabrication process and will use the Thames and Lombok cores.

Just like the Radeon HD 6900 series, these two cores are based on a VLIW4 (very long instruction word) architecture and are paired with GDDR5 memory.
If the information uncovered by Expreview is correct, then the highest performing Radeon HD 7000 solution to be launched in Q4 2011 is the HD 7870.

This features similar specifications with the current Radeon HD 6970, but thanks to the advanced fabrication process AMD managed to increase the GPU clock speed from 880MHz to 950MHz, while also decreasing the power consumption of the card from 250W to 120W.

As impressive as all this may sound, the Radeon HD 7900 series, which will be released most probably in the first quarter of 2012, manages to be even more thrilling as this will be based on AMD’s Next Generation Core (NCG) architecture detailed at the company’s Fusion Developer summit, which took place in mid-June.

We talked about this new arch in detail in some of our previous articles, so we are not going to get into this now, but the key aspect of NCG is that it will improve the performance and functionality of GPGPU computing.
Together with the all new architecture, AMD will most probably also introduce XDR2 memory developed by Rambus, which its manufacturer claims it can double the bandwidth of GDDR5, while using 30% less power.

Judging by the information leaked, the top part in the Radeon HD 7900 family is going to be called the HD 7970 and it includes 2048 shaders clocked at 1GHz, 128 texture units, 64 ROP units, a 256bit memory bus and 2GB of XDR2 video buffer.

This will work at an impressive 8000MHz, while the total power consumption of the card is rated at 190 watt.

Finally, is quite a bit early to tell if these specifications are indeed true, but all the rumors published until now seem to confirm the fact that a part of the Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards will be based on the Next Generation Core architecture.

Source: AMD’s Upcoming Radeon HD 7900 GPUs May Use XDR2 Rambus Memory - Softpedia

[kartikoli]

^^^ it all depend on price VS performance … we indians call it VFM … lets hope for the best

anyway price of 6 series should go down with this launch

[The_Knight]

@kartikoli

^^^ it all depend on price VS performance … we indians call it VFM … lets hope for the best

anyway price of 6 series should go down with this launch

hope so. But am waiting for nvidia 600 series.

[vivek.krishnan]

Lets hope XDR2 does not go the way of GDDR4 and RDRAM.