AMD Radeon HD 7890 "Tahiti LE" launches November 27

[Hilbert Hagedoorn]

Earlier on we talked about a Tahiti 7900 GPU being used for an upcoming 7800 series card. It seems that this, lets call it Tahiti LE with product name Radeon HD 7890, it seems it will be launchingÂ*on...

AMD Radeon HD 7890 "Tahiti LE" launches November 27

[BlackZero]

Give us the 8970, already!

[AndreasGuido]

what is the point? unless they majorly cut down prices of 7850/70..otherwise where is it gonna be price wise? between 7870 and 7950?

[micketh]

I'm very interested in this, I don't feel the 7870 is enough of a jump for me to consider the upgrade to be honest, however the 7950 would be ideal but slightly out of my price range at the moment.

[Matt26LFC]

Yeah, waiting for Sea Islands here, hopefully they'll arrive in a couple of months Then it'll be Pirate Islands for me

[Extraordinary]

Am I blind or is there nothing showing the cards specs ?

[Lane]

Originally Posted by micketh

I'm very interested in this, I don't feel the 7870 is enough of a jump for me to consider the upgrade to be honest, however the 7950 would be ideal but slightly out of my price range at the moment.

Im not sure, saying +50% performance over the 6870 ( let say your 5850 is close of a 6870 ) ... was not an upgrade. ofc it will be higher with a simple 7950-70.. but well, now at your place, i will wait for the HD8000 anyway if you are not in the need of change.

( rating made before the release of the 12.11 beta )

[micketh]

Originally Posted by Lane

Im not sure, saying +50% performance over the 6870 ( let say your 5850 is close of a 6870 ) ... was not an upgrade. ofc it will be higher with a simple 7950-70.. but well, now at your place, i will wait for the HD8000 anyway if you are not in the need of change.

( rating made before the release of the 12.11 beta )

I agree that there is a decent jump in performance, although I don't like to upgrade until the increase is closer to 100%, I feel that the best part of £200 isn't worth 50-60%... I'm still gaming happily on my system. I think the CPU is much more of a required upgrade. For which I'm currently eying a nice Ivy bridge setup, post Christmas of course.

Btw what game is that?

[The Goose]

how many in between this and that versions are they gonna try and push before they sell the company...if they do sell

[BLEH!]

If it brings AMD some more monies, good for them.

[Lane]

Originally Posted by The Goose

how many in between this and that versions are they gonna try and push before they sell the company...if they do sell

Why will you they sold anything ? lol ... The GPU department and the CPU one have only some small interaction. Im sorry i dont see the link between a new HD7800 for empty the stock of Thaiti core ( something similar of what have done nvidia with the 460 448cc and 560 by the past ) before launch a new series and AMD cpu departement.



A little graph history for the fun..

http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/...s-history-tree

[phenomkid7]

Originally Posted by BlackZero

Give us the 8970, already!

There will be no "new" 8970. It will be an updated 7970 with a new video bios and higher clocks.

5xxx series was a new arch, 6xxx was the same crap respun
Same thing for 8xxx, respun 7xxx. Go google it.

So 8970 won't really be that much better.

[deltatux]

I'll probably wait for the 8000 series or even skip that as well and go for the 9000 series because I see no need to upgrade from my Radeon HD 6870 as it serves my purposes quite well right now.

deltatux

[BlackZero]

Originally Posted by phenomkid7

There will be no "new" 8970. It will be an updated 7970 with a new video bios and higher clocks.

5xxx series was a new arch, 6xxx was the same crap respun
Same thing for 8xxx, respun 7xxx. Go google it.

So 8970 won't really be that much better.

I am aware that the 8 series will be based on GCN.

A numbering change usually entails more than a simple clock increase and updated bios. Generally, there are changes to the shader processor count. In some cases the ROPs, Vertex units and even memory bus width can also be modified. This can be verified when looking at the same examples mentioned in your post.

There also are usually small modifications to the architecture that can lead to improved efficiency; this is what generally allows for the higher clocks without a significant increase in TDP. In addition, memory data compression techniques are also updated for improved bandwidth efficiency.

In any case, even if it was just a simple increase in clocks and an updated bios, and assuming an overall improvement, I'd prefer buying the newer card seeing that the current series has now been around for nearly a year.

I just hope they get the new series out soon as I really want to upgrade within the next couple of months.


Edit:

I should have stated Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) rather than vertex units, however, in the change between the 5870 and the 6970 the actual vertex processing capabilities were also improved.

[Lane]

Originally Posted by phenomkid7

There will be no "new" 8970. It will be an updated 7970 with a new video bios and higher clocks.

5xxx series was a new arch, 6xxx was the same crap respun
Same thing for 8xxx, respun 7xxx. Go google it.

So 8970 won't really be that much better.

What are you talking about, the refresh is allways based on the last architecture.. but even the HD6900 was a lot different of Cypress..


Cypress was VLIW5 architecture when the NI/6000 was an VLIW4 architecture with doubled front end etc, initially the HD6000 should have been made on 32nm process, finally due to TSMC the HD6900 have come in 40nm ... Initially the HD6000 should have come with a lot more of SP, and was something between GCN and Cypress..

ofc the HD8000 will be made of GCN2, a refreshed and revisited version of GCN. Is the difference will be big ? huum, all depend what have been planned 3 years ago for this GCN2 architecture... a bit more SP, bigger cache, faster ROP or number increased, time will tell.. Many thing have not been included on GCN1, then you learn of how the architecture is working ( even code wise ), so you have allways a lot of tweaking available, including on the process ( transistor size, leak etc )

GCN2 will still stay on same 28nm process, so ofc, there's not so much to expect in term of gain by the process change. But there's a lot of tweaking possible on other parts.

[Boomstick777]

Originally Posted by phenomkid7

There will be no "new" 8970. It will be an updated 7970 with a new video bios and higher clocks.

5xxx series was a new arch, 6xxx was the same crap respun
Same thing for 8xxx, respun 7xxx. Go google it.

So 8970 won't really be that much better.

Are you forgetting that more shaders will be added and the arch will be tweaked for better performance? It won't be the 'same crap' as you eloquently put it :p.

The 8XXX series will still be a nice upgrade over the 7XXX series even if it only brings 10% - 15% better performance, it'll do it at similar price points. These new cards will most likely launch at cheaper prices than 7XXX series did due to 28nm being more mature, (Cheaper manufacture costs).

[-Tj-]

^
He's a banned AntiAMD troll, enough said.

Originally Posted by BlackZero

Give us the 8970, already!

this

[Andrew LB]

Originally Posted by BLEH!

If it brings AMD some more monies, good for them.

To me it looks like they're spending money creating a new card for a niche market that nobody will know about. Informed people like those on tech related forums understand this is just another revision of a revision of the 7xxx card and is nothing special, thus few will by it. And the uninformed masses who are easily fooled by marketing will typically not even know of this cards existence since it will not get enough news media coverage since it's not the 8xxx series.

Micro-targeting with a product such as this will cost AMD more than they'll make. I'll bet the same managers who came up with this brilliant idea are the same who dreamed up the 7980 extreme edition or whatever they call it.

Give us the 8970, already!

The upcoming release of a 7890LE gives me the impression that AMD won't be releasing any 8xxx series cards for at least 6 more months. I say this because AMD has never released a video card during the 6 month period prior to a new product line.

And when you factor in them not being able to build a 7990 card this time around when they did so for almost every other previous generation... things are not looking good for any 8xxx cards in the near future.

[BlackZero]

Originally Posted by Andrew LB

masses who are easily fooled by marketing will typically not even know of this cards existence since it will not get enough news media coverage since it's not the 8xxx series.

These are the people who generally buy based on cost, given the quantitative nature of such purchases and assuming the card is priced correctly, I do not see why it can not sell as expected.

Originally Posted by Andrew LB

The upcoming release of a 7890LE gives me the impression that AMD won't be releasing any 8xxx series cards for at least 6 more months. I say this because AMD has never released a video card during the 6 month period prior to a new product line.

I am also not sure why you reached that conclusion, it seems to me the idea behind this launch is to clear out stock levels or reduce numbers for units that don't quite make the cut for higher end parts. These are also not being launched as AMD backed reference cards, so I do not believe they provide any insight as to what AMD may have in plan for the next series of cards.

[mohiuddin]

by any chance, will it be on GCN 2 architecture?

[BLEH!]

Originally Posted by mohiuddin

by any chance, will it be on GCN 2 architecture?

Probably not. I guess this is something like nVidia did with the 560Ti 448 Core, trying to use up the dies that didn't cut the mustard for 7950 or 7970 standard.

[Lane]

Originally Posted by mohiuddin

by any chance, will it be on GCN 2 architecture?

100% sure, it will not.. It is based on Tahiti, Thaiti = 7950-7970 = GCN1.

GCN2 will be HD8000 series aka Sea Islands cards ( Or C Island as some call it ).