Launch dates of AMD HD 77x0/78x0 graphics cards: cpu-world article

[atticus14]

http://www.cpu-world.com//news_2012/2012013101_Launch_dates_of_AMD_HD_7x00_graphics_cards.html

Today, on January 31st, AMD is going to launch HD 7950, the second graphics card from HD 7000 series. This GPU has fewer stream processors, and somewhat lower core and memory clock speeds compared to previously released HD 7970. The HD 7950 should also be cheaper than the 7970. A number of more affordable HD 7xx0 cards will be coming later in the first quarter of this year. MSI yesterday published HD 7900 series infokit, that includes launch dates of AMD HD 77x0 cards, and launch month for HD 78x0:


According to the roadmap, HD7750 and HD7770 will be available on February 15. Both cards will have 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, and from previous reports we also know that the boards will have 900 MHz core frequency, 896 and 832 stream processors, and 56 and 52 texture units. The HD 7770 will be priced at $149, and HD 7750 will be $10 cheaper.
In March AMD will release HD 7850 and HD 7870 GPUs, both featuring 2 GB of RAM. The 78x0 series will have core and memory frequencies, comparable to 77x0 series, however they will pack from 1280 (HD 7850) to 1408 (HD 7870) stream processors, and from 80 to 88 texture units. HD7870 will retail for $299, and HD7850 will be $249.
The roadmap doesn't have launch date for HD 7990 card. Based on older reports, this dual-GPU card may launch in March 2012, and it will cost $849.

 

[poohbear]

looks like the 7870 will be the card to get as that's my affordable price point. Hopefully Nvidia's response will bring it down to $250 come the summer. mind u im not sure upgrading from a 5870 will be worth it.... the only thing remotely attractive is the 2gb of vid ram. usually i upgrade when a vid card offers about twice the performance increase, i just don't see that happening going from a 5870 to a 7870.

My 5870 plays BF3 with all settings at ultra but no AA and it runs perfectly fine, i avg 30-40fps on 64 man servers.

 

[Concillian]

7770 may finally give us some insight to GCN priorities.

I'm assuming shader, ROP and TMU performance is about 20% improved per clock over VLIW4/5 as the 7970 and 7950 seem to show about that when comparing to 6950 performance.

If we compare the 7770 and 6850 to the 5770, we have the following improvements (again assuming GCN is 120% per clock of VLIW5 on shader / TMU / ROP performance)

Bandwidth / Shader / TMU / ROP
7770 vs 5770 : 1.15 / 1.42 / 1.78 / 1.27
6850 vs 5770 : 1.67 / 1.09 / 1.09 / 1.82

benchmarks from these three cards should tell us quite a bit. 6850 has much higher ROP and bandwidth performance than the 7770, but 7770 has much higher shader and TMU performance. 6850 vs. 5770 showed us how important bandwidth and ROP was to VLIW5, because the 6850 is quite significantly faster than the 5770, but the shader and TMU performance is less than 10% faster. It will be interesting to see if GCN is in the same boat. I suspect this will still be the case, and that the high (relative) shader and TMU counts are there in the 7770 just to maximize the 128 bit throughput.

Regardless of the prices, that analysis should be interesting. Hopefully Ryan recognizes this too and at least has all three cards on the charts of the 7770 review with the updated drivers and platform. I'd guess he'd have to have a 5770 (or 6770) and 6850 just because that's where this card competes.

Even if you're interested in the 7850 or 7870, the 7770 release should help to define the performance levels more clearly of those cards. For comparison agains nVidia if they end up releasing a card in the $200-300 bracket before the HD78xx cards.

It would be nice to have something that is OC'ed 6950 performance for less power, but it's looking like AMD is going to charge up the ass for that. Hoping nVidia will come out with something to force the issue. Not holding my breath though.

If 7770 is only $150, 2x 5770 may compete with 7850 / 7870. Hopefully the bandwidth & ROP deficit doesn't hold it back too much.

 

[KompuKare]

Well, 7750/70 sounds like the most interesting to me since I don't game much (only really playing Skyrim atm and I only run at 1600x1200) but it really depends on the thermals.

ATM I have my old 8800GT but it's bumbgated on me and although the oven trick has held it for now (afterwards I modded the BIOS to run at about 70% for core, shaders and RAM too), eventually I'm sure it will die.

Ideally I'd like a fanless card and 28nm should hopefully allow that class of card to have a low enough wattage. Although a 28nm die shrink of a 5770/6770 would have been even better for my needs since GCN definitely has a larger transistor count due to gCompute which I don't think I need...

Another thing I'm kind of disappointed in that for the Tahiti while idle power received some attention (ok, it's for that class of card it is the best ever), compared to what AMD were able to achieve with power gating on their CPUs (was pleasantly surprised to see Lano beating Sandy Bridge at idle power usage and even Bulldozer idles fairly well too), Tahiti isn't that impressive.

Since I don't fold etc., the ideal for me would be a card which uses no more than 5-10W in 2D and naturally turns off the fan then idle. Actually, "long idle" combined with a APU and something like Lucid would a nice feature but no sign of anything like that.

 

[superjim]

7800 series in March? It was supposed to be February. They launch the hardest-to-produce cards first (7900) then the low-end-mainstream (7700) a month later finally the 7800 series another month later? Should the 7700 and 7800 be switched around? Doesn't make sense. I was also hoping to replace my 2.5 year old 5870 but I doubt the 7870 will be "enough" of a performance boost over it.

 

[Concillian]

Another thing I'm kind of disappointed in that for the Tahiti while idle power received some attention (ok, it's for that class of card it is the best ever), compared to what AMD were able to achieve with power gating on their CPUs (was pleasantly surprised to see Lano beating Sandy Bridge at idle power usage and even Bulldozer idles fairly well too), Tahiti isn't that impressive.

Since I don't fold etc., the ideal for me would be a card which uses no more than 5-10W in 2D and naturally turns off the fan then idle. Actually, "long idle" combined with a APU and something like Lucid would a nice feature but no sign of anything like that.

Well, you have to consider that a video card is a lot more than just a GPU. To compare it to a CPU is not right, since there are also voltage regulators, memory chips, etc....

The long idle vs. idle comparisons are showing that the cards consume only 9W more when displaying an "idle" image than when in long idle and a black screen, which is supposedly ~3W. Given you're powering a lot more than just a GPU, I'm not sure how much better you can expect a card to be at idle consumption. I mean a motherboard + CPU + IGP is still using 30+W when doing nothing. 12W for what is essentially another motherboard, processor and memory subsystem isn't bad, and I assume it's to the point where 1W savings requires very significant investment.

 

[Concillian]

7800 series in March? It was supposed to be February. They launch the hardest-to-produce cards first (7900) then the low-end-mainstream (7700) a month later finally the 7800 series another month later? Should the 7700 and 7800 be switched around? Doesn't make sense.

It does make (business) sense.

Release the highest performance card with no competition or alternatives to "upsell" as many people as possible. Then release the next highest version and hook as many of the next tier, etc...

If you release the 7870 at the same time as the 7950, then you lose an opportunity to get impatient 7870 buyers to move up in price to the 7950 because the 7950 is there and available when the 7870 is not.

This generation has been ALL about maxing profits for AMD. That has been clear. I don't like it either, but it's not like we have a choice in the matter unless we play into their hands and cough up more money.

 

[KompuKare]

Well, you have to consider that a video card is a lot more than just a GPU. To compare it to a CPU is not right, since there are also voltage regulators, memory chips, etc....

The long idle vs. idle comparisons are showing that the cards consume only 9W more when displaying an "idle" image than when in long idle and a black screen, which is supposedly ~3W. Given you're powering a lot more than just a GPU, I'm not sure how much better you can expect a card to be at idle consumption. I mean a motherboard + CPU + IGP is still using 30+W when doing nothing. 12W for what is essentially another motherboard, processor and memory subsystem isn't bad, and I assume it's to the point where 1W savings requires very significant investment.

You're right I guess. Thing is though, for mainstream cards power (and personally noise) is important and pretty soon Trinity will be at not much slower performance-wise and it's power gating is better.

Maybe it's time for AMD (and Nvidia too although their power figures have traditionally been worse - although if Apple have gone back to them despite bumbgate maybe their 28nm parts will change that) to consider a big.LITTLE strategy of having a simple 2D part on a dedicated part of the die maybe able to run straight off 3.3v or having a simple mW power circuit (although AMD sold off their mobile stuff to Qualcomm...)

 

[Subyman]

I'm a bit put off by march being the launch. I was hoping for mid Feb to get a taste of the modestly priced performance.

It seems like the sweet spot for enthusiasts will not be filled by AMD this time around (349.)

 

[superjim]

If you release the 7870 at the same time as the 7950, then you lose an opportunity to get impatient 7870 buyers to move up in price to the 7950 because the 7950 is there and available when the 7870 is not.

7800 series was "supposed" to be mid February. I don't consider 2-3 weeks the "same time" but maybe to AMD it is.

 

[MrTeal]

You're right I guess. Thing is though, for mainstream cards power (and personally noise) is important and pretty soon Trinity will be at not much slower performance-wise and it's power gating is better.

Trinity isn't going to be nowhere near the 77xx or 78xx series performance wise, and even the successors won't be in that class. Even the successors to Trinity won't reach those levels. A full 7770 at 28nm is 164mm^2. Trinity is reported to be about 240mm^2 at 32nm, and is VLIW-4 vs GCN. Not only that, but putting that much power into the APU would be wasteful since it still has to share a memory bus with the CPU. Even if it had exclusive access, dual channel DDR3-1866 still only gives a hair less than 30GB/s bandwidth. That's 1/3rd the bandwidth available to the 7770.

Not enough die space/transistors + TDP constrained + memory bandwidth gimped = Low performance. Even when AMD moves to Steamroller and GCN based APUs on 28nm, you won't see 7770 levels of performance out of them for the same reason.

 

[Concillian]

You're right I guess. Thing is though, for mainstream cards power (and personally noise) is important and pretty soon Trinity will be at not much slower performance-wise and it's power gating is better.

We'll see how Trinity is for power, but for performance we know that even if it's quad channel DDR3, bandwidth will be severely limited compared to what people are used to having on a discrete card.

Quad channel DDR3-1600 is limited to 51.2 GB/sec and a 5770 is 73 and fairly limited by bandwidth. 7770 is expected to land around 85-90 GB/sec and also is expected to be limited by bandwidth. For people that a 5670 is enough will be okay with Trinity, but that's going to be pretty limited in terms of resolution and graphics features compared to a 7750. These are in completely different performance categories. To say that it won't be much slower performance-wise is kinda silly. It will be much slower. No matter the number of shaders, Trinity will be limited o significantly less than 5750 speed due to the bandwidth alone, and a 7750 will likely be at least 50% faster.

Thing is though, for mainstream cards power (and personally noise) is important

If noise is really important, you can do pretty well with aftermarket cooling. I have a 4850 cooled with an AC Accelero S1 Rev 2 and a 120mm fan zip tied to it that is so quiet I have to have the case open and my head near it to hear the fan. Temps are lower than stock and by cooling the inadequately cooled stock VRMs I was able to run higher clocks at the same power draw from the wall because VRM inefficiency was causing additional power draw.

Quiet is about spending money to make it quiet if that's your priority. No stock card will be quiet aside from passive cards, and most of those are priced astronomically to the point that they don't make sense either. It's not that hard to cool a system very quietly as long as you aren't trying to also be too cheap to pay for what really works for quiet cooling (quiet fans and efficient cooling designs cost money). I generally figure no matter what card I'm buying I'm gonna need an additional ~$50 or so to be able to make the cooling tolerable in terms of noise.

 

[KompuKare]

Trinity is going to be nowhere near the 77xx or 78xx series performance wise, and even the successors won't be in that class. Even the successors to Trinity won't reach those levels. A full 7770 at 28nm is 164mm^2. Trinity is reported to be about 240mm^2 at 32nm, and is VLIW-4 vs GCN.

Fair enough, Trinity won't be anywhere near that. But anyway what interests me in the GPU vs APU (whether Lano or Sandy Bridge) is their excellent power gating and idle power usage. But actually, if even Tahiti does 2D idle in 15W or so, a decent heatsink and design should allow it to turn off the in 2D or run at 10% or so (not sure what DC motors can run that slow but...)

 

[Mopetar]

It does make (business) sense.

. . .

This generation has been ALL about maxing profits for AMD. That has been clear. I don't like it either, but it's not like we have a choice in the matter unless we play into their hands and cough up more money.

Pretty much spot on. We're not going to see AMD become even remotely price competitive until nVidia launches their new cards, and even then if nVidia decides to keep their own prices high there isn't going to be a lot of pressure on AMD to cut prices. Given that nVidia has never shown too much inclination to cut their own throat with low margins, it's quite likely that prices in general will remain high over this generation.

 

[tincart]

Nothing priced at $200 so far? I'm disappointed. Someone needs to give me a $200 reason to throw my money at them.