AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs
by Ryan Smith on September 23, 2009 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Meet the Rest of the Evergreen Family
Somewhere on the way to Cypress, AMD’s small die strategy got slightly off-track.
AMD’s small-die strategy for RV770
Cypress is 334mm2, compared to 260mm2 for RV770. In that space they can pack 2.15 billion transistors, versus 956 million on the RV770, and come out at a load power of 188W versus 160W on the RV770. AMD called 256mm2 their sweet spot for the small die strategy, and Cypress missed that sweet spot.
The cost of missing the sweet spot is that by missing the size, they’re missing the price. The Cypress cards are $379 and $259, compared to $299 and $199 that the original small die strategy dictated. This has resulted in a hole in the Evergreen family, which is why we’re going to see one more member than usual.
As Cypress is the base chip, there are 4 designs and 3 different chips that will be derived from it. Above Cypress is Hemlock, which will be the requisite X2 part using a pair of Cypress cores. Hemlock is going to be interesting to watch not just for its performance, but because by missing their sweet spot, AMD is running a bit hot. A literal pair of 5870s is 376W, which is well over the 300W limit of a 6-pin + 8-pin power configuration. AMD saves some power in a single card (which is how they got the 4870 under the limit) but it likely won’t be enough. We’ll be keeping an eye on this matter to see what AMD ends up doing to get Hemlock out the door at the right power load. As scheduled we should see Hemlock before the end of the year, although given the supply problems for Cypress that we mentioned earlier, it’s going to be close.
The “new” member of the Evergreen family is Juniper, a part born out of the fact that Cypress was too big. Juniper is the part that’s going to let AMD compete in the <$200 category that the 4850 was launched in. It’s going to be a cut-down version of Cypress, and we know from AMD’s simulation testing that it’s going to be a 14 SIMD part. We would wager that it’s going to lose some ROPs too. As AMD does not believe they’re particularly bandwidth limited at this time with GDDR5, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a smaller bus too (perhaps 192bit?). Juniper based cards are expected in the November timeframe.
Finally at the bottom we have Redwood and Cedar, the Evergreen family’s compliments to RV710 and RV730. These will be the low-end parts derived from Cypress, and will launch in Q1 of 2010. All told, AMD will be launching 4 chips in less than 6 months, giving them a top-to-bottom range of DX11 parts. The launch of 4 chips in such a short time frame is something their engineering staff is very proud of.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
327 Comments
View All Comments
Scali - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Here's a screenshot of my 8800GTS320 getting almost 49 fps when I overclock it:http://bohemiq.scali.eu.org/OceanCS8800GTS.png">http://bohemiq.scali.eu.org/OceanCS8800GTS.png
So you see why I think 47 fps for a GTX285 is weird. It should easily beat the 72 fps of the HD5870. Even an 8800Ultra might get close to that number.
mapesdhs - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 - link
I sincerely nope not as we need the competition. See:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/does-amd-really-p...">http://www.marketwatch.com/story/does-a...-pose-a-...
Ian.
Johnwo - Monday, September 28, 2009 - link
so wait, can this card play Crysis?vsl2020 - Sunday, September 27, 2009 - link
AMD only introducing new things which merely would make yur frap fps go 1000 and thats it.....no new good or interesting features such as what nvidia did with physx/3d Stereoscopic or similar that would convince me thats the way to the future...why should I need to buy a new dx11gpu only can do 1000fps...I would still luv my 260+ and 60fps in batman arkhum or other games which supported phsyx or similar...AMD just bring us back to the stone age race ..who has the higher fps race......
Jamahl - Tuesday, September 29, 2009 - link
did you even read the review? what about eyefinity, you know a good way to use up those 1000fps by adding more screens?you can be stuck with your 260, you aren't really gaming unless you are gaming on eyefinity.
Zool - Monday, September 28, 2009 - link
Actualy the delaying of nvidia dx11 card will make introducing new things harder. DX11 and OpenCL means enough that u can forget nvidias physx. At least with open platform dewelopers could finaly merge gpu and cpu code and make some more usefull things than improwed water splashing,unrealistic glass shatering and curtains which just run on top of the code and act as some kind of postprocessing + efects just to maintain compatibility.(miles away from the nvidia demos)And also dx11 compute shader can make these things.
RNViper - Sunday, September 27, 2009 - link
Hey GuysNeed Eyefinity a Nativ DisplayPort TFT?
pawaniitr - Sunday, September 27, 2009 - link
maybe a 2 GiB memory will help this card at highest resolutionswaiting for that version
Troll Trolling - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link
I think you guys from anandtech could do an article explaining why the new Radeons don't don't double performance, even with doubled specs.It happened too with the HD 4870, it had more than doubled everything (except bandwidht, that was 80% higher) and was not close from double performance.
SiliconDoc - Saturday, September 26, 2009 - link
PS - The bandwidth is not doubled.124GB/sec to 153GB/sec, nowhere near an 80% increasse, let alone, virtually double.