[BitsAndChips]390X ready for launch - AMD ironing out drivers - Computex launch

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therealnickdanger

Senior member
Oct 26, 2005
987
2
0
Azix said:
something new for people to complain about. Tubes not long enough, tubes too long.
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"But what if it leaks? It's just not worth the risk!"
"The harsh chemicals used in water cooling aren't safe for babies to drink."
"The tubes are a choking hazard."
 
T

Techhog

Platinum Member
Sep 11, 2013
2,834
2
26
NeoLuxembourg said:
The rebrand is the 380 OEM ... we know nothing about the non-OEM version yet.
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AMD lists OEM versions of cards clearly on their site. These cards are listed alongside the retail versions. This isn't OEM; AMD's marketing team has just thrown in the towel.
 
poofyhairguy

poofyhairguy

Lifer
Nov 20, 2005
14,612
318
126
Techhog said:
You should have expected Tonga to be rebranded,
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Exactly. We non-Apple customers haven't gotten to see a full Tonga. You have to think now the yields are good enough to give us the full chip with the bigger memory bus and the 3GB of ram that 285 is starving for (and is needed to finally retire the 7970).
 
E

Erenhardt

Diamond Member
Dec 1, 2012
3,251
105
101
Techhog said:
AMD lists OEM versions of cards clearly on their site. These cards are listed alongside the retail versions. This isn't OEM; AMD's marketing team has just thrown in the towel.
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If you cared enough you would check before spreading FUD.
 
ShintaiDK

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
146
106
poofyhairguy said:
Exactly. We non-Apple customers haven't gotten to see a full Tonga. You have to think now the yields are good enough to give us the full chip with the bigger memory bus and the 3GB of ram that 285 is starving for (and is needed to finally retire the 7970).
Click to expand...

I dont think you see 3GB, but 2 or 4. Its a 256bit bus.
 
K

Kenmitch

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
8,505
2,250
136
Comments like the real new architecture is the 4xx series along with untouched by current rumors could have been quiet leaks.

Not sure if 4xx is coming soon or not....Reading speculation threads at least kill time till we see what happens.
 
shady28

shady28

Platinum Member
Apr 11, 2004
2,520
397
126
NeoLuxembourg said:
The rebrand is the 380 OEM ... we know nothing about the non-OEM version yet.
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This is all just wishful thinking.

Go back and look at midrange and higher OEM vs Retail of the past. The OEM version is almost always the same chip, just at stock clocks.

Now at the low end and on mobile, they have mixed and matched dissimilar products plenty.

Beyond the obvious of clock increases / memory speed increases, what's plainly obvious at this point :

R9 380 = R9 285 Tonga, maybe with some clock/memory speed and driver improvements, hopefully with 3GB capability
R9 380X = Full Tonga (2048 SP and/or 384 bit)

This is right in line with reasonable expectations of performance increases.

ie, vs the R9 280 3GB, the R9 285 2GB is 8.5% faster at 1080p on average, 4.7% faster at 4K, and has a max power consumption 25% lower.

So if you take what is known about the R9 285, a 3GB R9 380 version with improved drivers and higher clocks would be a solid if not spectacular improvement.

Ditto with full Tonga R9 380X vs R9 280X.

But no it's not a slam dunk and it's not a Maxwell killer.

Welcome back to the slow pace of GPU / CPU innovation.
 
G

gamervivek

Senior member
Jan 17, 2011
490
53
91
ShintaiDK said:
Tonga is already 359mm2. Not sure what would be expected else as 380.
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And the 390 series is at >550mm2, not enough to slip in a 440-470mm3 chip in between? If the 390 performs close to 295X2, it'd be quite a drop from that to barely 290 levels of performance.
I'm seeing quite a bit of wishful thinking here.
 
J

JDG1980

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2013
1,663
570
136
shady28 said:
This is all just wishful thinking.

Go back and look at midrange and higher OEM vs Retail of the past. The OEM version is almost always the same chip, just at stock clocks.
Click to expand...

GTX 760 retail: 32 ROPs, 256-bit bus, 2 GB of 6.0 GHz GDDR5
GTX 760 OEM: 24 ROPs, 192-bit bus, 1.5 GB of 5.6 GHz GDDR5

And then later they released yet another GTX 760 OEM to bring it up to retail specs (with 3GB of RAM, no less).


shady28 said:
R9 380 = R9 285 Tonga, maybe with some clock/memory speed and driver improvements, hopefully with 3GB capability
R9 380X = Full Tonga (2048 SP and/or 384 bit)

This is right in line with reasonable expectations of performance increases.

ie, vs the R9 280 3GB, the R9 285 2GB is 8.5% faster at 1080p on average, 4.7% faster at 4K, and has a max power consumption 25% lower.

So if you take what is known about the R9 285, a 3GB R9 380 version with improved drivers and higher clocks would be a solid if not spectacular improvement.

Ditto with full Tonga R9 380X vs R9 280X.
Click to expand...

First of all, AMD's competition is Maxwell, not its old parts. It doesn't matter if AMD manages a marginal improvement over ancient GCN 1.0 if it still can't compete with Nvidia.

Secondly, you're being overly optimistic about the R9 285 power consumption. TechPowerUp measures 250W maximum, compared to just 171W for the Tahiti-based HD 7950 (they never measured a non-X 280, but it's the same card with a different name). So efficiency went down, not up. If R9 285 is trash silicon from Apple wafers, then efficiency could be improved by better binning. But if AMD is too lazy to do anything new, then they're probably not going to bother.

shady28 said:
Welcome back to the slow pace of GPU / CPU innovation.
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But it's not "GPU innovation", it's just AMD. If you're in a market where the pace of innovation is slow, you can get away with this sort of thing. But in the computer industry, which still has a relatively fast pace of innovation, it's not like this. When your competitor has a product that blows yours away, you can't sit on your butt and rebrand something that was first released three years ago.
 
J

JDG1980

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2013
1,663
570
136
ShintaiDK said:
Tonga is already 359mm2. Not sure what would be expected else as 380.
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Something competitive? Even at $229, Tonga would be a tough sell. I'd go for it if they could get the power consumption down to 140W and add a HEVC decoder, but not for the currently shipping product.
 
J

JDG1980

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2013
1,663
570
136
poofyhairguy said:
Exactly. We non-Apple customers haven't gotten to see a full Tonga. You have to think now the yields are good enough to give us the full chip with the bigger memory bus and the 3GB of ram that 285 is starving for (and is needed to finally retire the 7970).
Click to expand...

There was never any good reason to think Tonga had a 384-bit bus. It doesn't need it and even the full Tonga in the Retina iMac is still on 256-bit.

To keep a symmetrical configuration you would want the memory at 4GB, not 3GB. Heck, the FirePro W7100 comes with 8GB.

I think AMD still has big back stocks of Tahiti, which is why the 280 and 280X are still on the market. Someone, probably during the cryptocurrency boom, really screwed up demand predictions and created far more than the market could bear. AMD didn't ship any GPUs or APUs during Q1 2015 because there were so many unsold parts out there.

These back stocks may be the reason there is no R9 285X. Another possible reason is that AMD isn't proactively ordering wafers of Tonga (once bitten, twice shy). Instead, they're only ordering as needed to fill Apple's demand. The R9 285 gets the trash silicon, too leaky to meet the iMac's power requirements.
 
Y

youshotwhointhe

Junior Member
Aug 23, 2012
11
0
0
I am guessing the 285 was a salvaged chip after they messed up the fine grained power gating intended for their 300 series update. They have had to fix their power control circuitry twice already: trinity (fixed in richland) and kabini (fixed in beema).

So the 380 could be a fixed Tonga.
 
J

JDG1980

Golden Member
Jul 18, 2013
1,663
570
136
LTC8K6 said:
GTX 960 is not necessarily low power either, at 198 watts max.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gigabyte/GTX_960_OC/25.html
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That's just Gigabyte being Gigabyte. They've done some really weird stuff with the Maxwell cards, which results in their GTX 980 having a maximum power of an insane 342 watts, despite the fact that the reference card only tops out at 190 watts by the same chart.

As there is no reference R9 285, the Sapphire is the closest you can get (Sapphire is AMD's house AIB). According to the TPU article, "I also clocked the Sapphire board to AMD reference design levels, where I saw 184W average and 200W peak, which is a really small change." So the overclocking doesn't seem to be the culprit. I really think the poor power consumption of desktop Tonga is due at least in part to all the good chips going to the Retina iMac (and maybe Dell Alienware systems). The R9 285 is just a method to dispose of trash silicon. Let's hope that the "R9 300" series OEM cards are a similar expediency and not AMD's actual strategy for the desktop market this year.
 
O

ocre

Golden Member
Dec 26, 2008
1,594
7
81
Do you not know that different sites use different methods for power measurements. Different games and different apps.

There is nothing unusual and different results are the norm. Every game stress your GPU in different ways. Heck, the same game will stress your GPU depending on the location and what is going on
 
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