Crystal ball time.
AMD
IQ
Here's a geek-oriented mini-IQ test. What comes next in the following
sequence: 5870, 5850,.....?
The answer is 5770, as that's the nomenclature attached to the next GPU
to be released by AMD in the very near future.
Soon to be a part of the DX11-totin' 5-series range, Radeon HD 5770
aims to bring RV870 goodness to the masses.
Looking back on the last week,
Radeon HD 5870 (£300)
and
Radeon
HD 5850 (£200) have
been launched to tempt gamers into spending large amounts of change on
GPUs, so the question remains as to how the CPU-and-graphics
giant will snip pricing to levels that are more palatable for the
proletariat
Juniper
We reckon the 'Juniper' HD 5770 will come in at less than $200
(£150). Let's conjecture on what needs to happen for AMD and
its partners to hit that price point and for everyone (bar NVIDIA, of
course) to be happy.
Image courtesy of AMD
Rumours
are abound that the HD 5870's guts will be harvested such that 1,120
Stream Processors - 14 blocks of 80 - remain intact from the
full-fat card. Assuming this is true, ripping out six SIMD arrays will
lead to the texturing units dropping to 56.
An age-old method of reducing costs is to snip the memory-interface
width. We'd bet on a 192-bit bus supplanting the 256-bit on the HD 58xx
GPUs. Now we're at it, snipping the frame-buffer to 768MBs of GDDR5
doesn't sound like a bad idea, either.
Putting ourselves in AMD's shoes, we'd keep this architecture and clock
it in lower for the Radeon HD 5750, priced at around £115. If
we're really nasty, we'd chop bandwidth to 128 bits, but that's
probably the preserve of the Radeon HD 55xx GPU.
What would it look like? If the Radeon HD 4770 is anything go by, a
smaller, quieter single-slot cooler would be, literally, cool.
Product
line-up headaches
Should the Radeon HD 57x0
GPUs come to pass quickly, we wonder what AIBs will do with stock of
Radeon HD 4890 GPUs. We'd hazard that the new mid-range 5-series GPUs
will be touch quicker on a comparable price-to-price basis, yet ship
with a fuller feature-set, including way better multi-monitor support, and lower power-draw.
Let's see how much of this come true, because, folks, the architecture
can be pared in only so many ways.
Would you buy a 'Radeon HD 5770' at £150 if it shipped with
the credentials listed above? We'd love to find out.
HEXUS related reading
HEXUS.net -
reviews ::
AMD Radeon HD 5450 graphics-card review. £40 of value?
HEXUS.net -
news ::
AMD rolls out ATI Catalyst 10.1, introduces support for Ubuntu 9.10
HEXUS.channel -
news ::
AMD steals share from Intel in record quarter for PC sales
HEXUS.channel -
interviews ::
HEXUS.TalkingShop: AMD as a consumer electronics company
HEXUS.net -
news ::
AMD bolsters budget CPU line with new Phenom and Athlon additions
HEXUS.net -
press releases ::
Graphics for Virtually Everything with Club 3D Radeon HD 5570 and Radeon HD 5550
HEXUS.net -
press releases ::
HIS Launch the Ultimate Low Cost HD Graphics Card
HEXUS.net -
press releases ::
POWERCOLOR ANNOUNCES THE GRAPHICS FOR ADVANCED HD ENTERTAINMENT: HD5500 SERIES
HEXUS.net -
press releases ::
VERTEX3D ANNOUNCES THE HD5570 FOR OUTSTAINDING HOME ENTERTAINMENT EXPERIENCE
HEXUS.net -
press releases ::
SAPPHIRE Launches HD 5570All AMD related content on HEXUS
printer friendly layout 
discuss in the forums 
email to a friend
IE7 Search
Firefox 2 Search
HEXUS.community :: your right2reply
On that basis, I wouldn't be surprised to see a 5830 come out with 1120 cores coupled with 256bit DDR5 memory (@ 800MHz perhaps?). Then, I'd expect a 5770 to be basically the same card but with a reduced memory bus: probably right down to 128bit (ATI don't seem to like using "in between" buses like 192bit...). It may seem like madness, but I'd expect it to be running at 1200MHz like the 5870, providing more bandwidth than most DDR3 cards can boast. Then assuming the pattern follows on from 58xx, we'll see a 5750 with 960 cores and 1GHz DDR5 memory, and possibly even a 5730 with 800 cores?
Below that, I'd expect a 5600 series with 800 / 640 (/ 480?) cores, and a 5550 card with 320 (I doubt they'll do more than one sku at that point). Maybe there'll also be an entry level 5450 with 160? They'd all support 128bit DDR3 memory buses.
Of course, moving to 1600 cores means they have a lot more mileage in stripping out cores from this architecture - that kind of makes this level of conjecture tricky... ;)Quote
They're stuffed for at least three months. The best we'll get in the meantime is a DX10.1 part. Looks like the rumours are true. If they could have shown silicon, they would.
Given the turn around times for silicon I'd say thats at the Earliest. I'd lean to pushing feb 2010 before retail cards are available. /Maybe/ even as late as april/may if they have to do another respin. (Which if they do... really screws them up. So look for the first cards to be "broken" in some way if they manage to stumble out the door)
Its embarressing really to make this kind of misstep. Their engineers must be cringing at this level of cockup. Its a seriously sad way to go. Just wish they would fire the drone that ****ed up the decisions to go this way.
Course, the question is whether when Nvidia ship the GT300 they're doing the equivalent of a Core Duo or a Penryn. Intel got shafted with P4 Prescott, recovered with the interim solutions of Pentium D, Core Duo, hit into a high gear with Core 2 Duo and perfected it with the 45nm Penryn architecture. If the GT300 is as hot and power hungry as some people think, it'll be the equivalent of a Prescott or some of the pentium D chips : hot, power hungry, clocked to hell with a couple of mostly working new features tacked on.
Heh. I was actually going with the Willemette P4... I still think they have their own Prescott in the wings! But on 2nd thoughts mebbe your Prescott analogy is more accurate.
As for features. Thats another huge screwup. They knew the specs of DX10 and they screwed up and couldnt get the cards to work so pleaded with MS to "revise" the spec and we ended up with 10.1 being the more usefull standard. Now again they are playing catchup with DX11.
Oh well we can but pray they sort it out becuase otherwise they are screwed for an entire cycle and that means Dec 2010 before anything else.
oh and reflection on dx10 and vista? The driver schema was changed due to NV being unable to fix their broken vista drivers so again the "secure" OS was broken.
Thank god 7 is miles better. I've even run it on a p3 1ghz with 1gb of ram. Vista damn near exploded on the same setup. Colour me impressed. However. Threadjack... so i'll get my coat.Quote
oh and reflection on dx10 and vista? The driver schema was changed due to NV being unable to fix their broken vista drivers so again the "secure" OS was broken.
Are you referring to WDDM 1.0 being unable to support more than one graphics driver simultaneously, the original DX10 being cannibalised and split into a lacklustre DX10 and a later fully featured DX10.1 or something completely different?
PKQuote
Are you referring to WDDM 1.0 being unable to support more than one graphics driver simultaneously, the original DX10 being cannibalised and split into a lacklustre DX10 and a later fully featured DX10.1 or something completely different?
PK
mostly the original DX10 being gutted. But there was an article somewhere that detailed how as NV couldnt get the driver working MS dropped some of the requirements and so driver protection isnt as tight as it should have been. (The total reworking of it to be outside the kernal AFAIK.) Its been a while since i read it and i havent had my coffee yet so i'm somewhat fuzzy still.Quote
Reply