[VC] AMD Radeon HD 9000 Series Launching in October?

[Final8ty]

June was surely a month of GeForce GTX 700 series. NVIDIA launched three cards in less than 30 days without any actual response from AMD.

If you thought that AMD engineers were on vacation then you are mistaken. Apparently they were working on new GPUs, especially a Hawaii silicon, which is believed to power the upcoming Radeon HD 9970 and HD 9950. Yes, that?s not a typo, AMD will supposedly drop the HD 8000 naming reserved for OEM-parts, and use HD 9000 instead. This was rumored for a long time, but people were not convinced enough to confirmed it. According to my sources this is true, there won?t be any Radeon HD 8970 non-OEM card, which if you think about actually makes sense. Imagine two cards having the same name, but different specs. Maybe now people will stop posting Radeon HD 8970 OEM datasheet as a news about a leaked document directly from AMD site (seriously don?t do that).

According to ChinaDIY, AMD could be preparing its Radeon HD 9000 series for October, which is the launch month for Battlefield 4, a Gaming Evolved title. My information is more optimistic. Unless the roadmap has changed, AMD could show off the new series in September. Some sources even claim it could be the first week of September. Regardless of what month is it going to be, we are two or three months until the new series arrive. Most likely AMD will start with HD 9970, which if the rumors are true will be faster than GeForce GTX 780, but slower than GTX TITAN. However the big question is not the performance, but the price. If the card would cost $550, then we have a clear winner.

The Chinese source also claims that AMD will resurrect the Radeon 9550, only now with the HD-part. Interesting fact is that it?s almost exactly 9 years since the launch of this card.

http://videocardz.com/43446/amd-radeon-hd-9000-series-launching-october

 

[Borealis7]

cool, the 5XXX series launched in Setpember 2009 so skipping a number makes it look like they have a series each year since '09

 

[Final8ty]

Bring me the HD9990 goodness.

 

[SPBHM]

9700 PRO please

 

[Mem]

9700 PRO please

Been done

.

 

[Jacky60]

Check the AMD website, the 8970 specs are already up!

 

[raghu78]

My guess is late September launch for HD 9970 / HD 9950 with volume availability from day one. will be a TSMC 28nm product. no doubt about that. can it match Titan and be priced at USD 550 - 600. thats the question. and also whats the OC headroom on this chip. if it can match Titan perf at 1 Ghz stock clocks we will see better pricing from Nvidia.

 

[ultimatebob]

I hope that most of these are real products, and not just more rebranded 7xxx and 6xxx series hardware.

Both NVidia and AMD's "new" product naming conventions are starting to piss me off.

 

[Stuka87]

I hope that most of these are real products, and not just more rebranded 7xxx and 6xxx series hardware.

Both NVidia and AMD's "new" product naming conventions are starting to piss me off.

From what AMD has said, this should be GCN 2.0. Which has a lot of new features. Its not just a rebrand like what nVidia just did. Which a GTX770 is a GTX680 with a slightly different clock.

And the 7970/7950 were not 6000 series rebrands. The only 6000 series rebrands are for the very low end market, or for their APU's. And that will change here soon with they both move to GCN based GPU's.

 

[moonbogg]

Faster than 780 but slower than Titan? Thats a fine hair to split. It good that the cards will be fast, but with AMD's next gen playing catch up with Nvidia's current gen, I can't see how thats exciting or changes things since Maxwell will come out maybe 6 months after that and will rebalance things back to where they are now. It will all come down to price. Before maxwell, the cards should be priced about the same as a GTX 780. After maxwell, the new AMD cards will go down to $400 I bet, unless Maxwell sells for $1,500 (probably will).

 

[Smoblikat]

If they sell cards at 500$ ea I will buy 4. Especially if they are 512-bit, on a 20nm node.

 

[raghu78]

Maxwell can be expected at the earliest by June or July 2014. TSMC 20nm is scheduled for volume production in Q2 2014.

if the HD 9970 launches in september and matches titan it should be well placed to reap good sales.

 

[Will Robinson]

Faster than 780 but slower than Titan? Thats a fine hair to split. It good that the cards will be fast, but with AMD's next gen playing catch up with Nvidia's current gen, I can't see how thats exciting or changes things since Maxwell will come out maybe 6 months after that and will rebalance things back to where they are now. It will all come down to price. Before maxwell, the cards should be priced about the same as a GTX 780. After maxwell, the new AMD cards will go down to $400 I bet, unless Maxwell sells for $1,500 (probably will).

First of all it'll be no small feat to beat the GTX780 and if they can pull it off for $500 or less its a winner I'd reckon.:thumbsup:

 

[RussianSensation]

Faster than 780 but slower than Titan? Thats a fine hair to split. It good that the cards will be fast, but with AMD's next gen playing catch up with Nvidia's current gen, I can't see how thats exciting or changes things since Maxwell will come out maybe 6 months after that and will rebalance things back to where they are now.

Maxwell launching 6 months from October? Doubtful. It probably won't be out until 2H of 2014. Apple just signed a deal with TSMC and demand for 20nm chips is expected to be higher than 28nm was. Also, why is this AMD's next generation vs. Maxwell? This is most likely a 28nm respin of GCN 1.0, aka 1.1, and next real gen from AMD should be 20nm GCN 2.0 against Maxwell 20nm.

As raghu78 pointed out before, "TSMC's 20nm process technology can provide 30% higher speed, 1.9 times the density, or 25% less power than its 28nm technology."
http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/20nm.htm

This is a far cry from the move 40nm --> 28nm move. I can see AMD going with 28nm in October and both AMD/NV delaying 20nm 1 quarter from Q2 to Q3 2014 due to excess demand for 2014 and allowing another 3 months for prices of new wafer node to subside a bit so they do not have to pay through the nose for the early 5-10% volume 20nm production from TSMC.

Let's hope we get 780 performance for $549. :thumbsup:

 

[tviceman]

Maxwell launching 6 months from October? Doubtful. It probably won't be out until 2H of 2014. Apple just signed a deal with TSMC and demand for 20nm chips is expected to be higher than 28nm was. Also, why is this AMD's next generation vs. Maxwell? This is most likely a 28nm respin of GCN 1.0, aka 1.1, and next real gen from AMD should be 20nm GCN 2.0 against Maxwell 20nm.

Exactly this. 20nm parts aren't coming from either company until summer next year (I'm guessing late summer).

Let's hope we get 780 performance for $549. :thumbsup:

Take the performance rumors with a grain of salt and a shot of Tequila. The 6970 was hyped to be 30-40% faster than the 5870, and up until a few short days before it's release, the rumor mill kept pimping it up to that. I do think that this new high end chip from AMD will trade blows with the gtx780, but outright noticeably faster? No I don't think that will happen. It will probably compare very similar to the gtx770 vs. hd7970GE. Regardless, consumers will win no matter where it ends up on the performance scale. AMD will undoubtedly offer much better perf/$ than the gtx780, and Nvidia will have to respond with price cuts and, more than likely, a gtx785 (GK110 with more functional cuda cores) to keep their margins and performance crown. Nvidia obviously has lots of headroom with GK110, and with the chip being in production for close to a year now, there are probably enough 14-15 SMX parts that they can launch with higher clock speeds and 7.0 ghz vram to counter.

EDIT: I think we'll also see a gtx770ti, comprised of a 12 SMX GK110 with a 320-bit bus, to keep ASP's higher and move defective chips.

 

[tviceman]

First of all it'll be no small feat to beat the GTX780 and if they can pull it off for $500 or less its a winner I'd reckon.:thumbsup:

I'm guessing ~gtx780 performance for $549.

 

[Imouto]

Bring 6 GB VRAM as baseline for the high end plox.

 

[blackened23]

Faster than 780 but slower than Titan? Thats a fine hair to split. It good that the cards will be fast, but with AMD's next gen playing catch up with Nvidia's current gen, I can't see how thats exciting or changes things since Maxwell will come out maybe 6 months after that and will rebalance things back to where they are now. It will all come down to price. Before maxwell, the cards should be priced about the same as a GTX 780. After maxwell, the new AMD cards will go down to $400 I bet, unless Maxwell sells for $1,500 (probably will).

I don't know. I have a lot of respect for nvidia but rarely have they delivered on time (both Fermi and Kepler were 1 year late), and to complicate matters -- the important issue here is that 20nm is 1) prohibitively expensive and 2) Apple will likely get first priority on 20nm, since they are TSMC's biggest customer now. Apple can purchase 500+ million chips on a whim, whereas nvidia / AMD really can't ever approach that volume. Therefore with that being the case, I feel like nvidia/AMD will always fall behind Apple in terms of preference for the 20nm process.

So with that said, Maxwell certainly looks like an exciting product. But i'm not so sure about the early 2014 timeline, mainly because of Apple using all of the 20nm volume at TSMC. I think late summer/fall 2014 is far more likely, if anything. Here's what I think the HD9000 series should be: A high end SKU competetive with the GTX 780 while being 100$ cheaper. With BF4 bundled. Heck, even a coupon for BF4 with a discount would be awesome - I don't see BF4 being given away for free since it is such a huge title, now that I think of it. But even some type of coupon should be sufficient to sell a lot of cards - I remember the 9700 pro back in the day had HL2 bundled (I think? someone correct me if i'm wrong...) and they sold a gabillion cards because of it. Also, i'd like to see AMD having crossfire issues fixed. And, please, put a better reference cooler on the 9970 - the reference cooler used on the past 3 generations of cards aren't sufficient. Massive improvements there are needed. If they can do all of that, I think AMD can win a lot of customers back.

 

[RussianSensation]

Take the performance rumors with a grain of salt and a shot of Tequila. The 6970 was hyped to be 30-40% faster than the 5870, and up until a few short days before it's release, the rumor mill kept pimping it up to that.

I don't remember that at all. There were rumours of HD6970 being a 1920 SP part but most of us dismissed those as unrealistic after seeing 6850/6870. GTX780 is about 16-22% faster than HD7970GE, depending on the review; let's say 22%. Therefore, AMD doesn't need a 30-40% faster card to reach GTX780's speed. HD6970 came out barely more than a year after 5870, while AMD has had nearly 2 years to update HD7970 series. That means it's a lot easier to get 22-25% performance out of 7970GE than it was to go from 5870 to 6970. 7970 is ROP and ACE limited. I think the reason AMD was unable to release a strong refresh up to this point is because they don't have enough engineering resources and funds. Maybe after they realized this spring that 20nm won't be possible by Q1 2014, they decided to start working on a real 7970 refresh, which is why they are so far behind NV's 780/Titan on the release time schedule.

I do think that this new high end chip from AMD will trade blows with the gtx780, but outright noticeably faster?

The rumour doesn't say that HD9970 will be noticeably faster. It only says it's expected to come in between 780 and Titan, which means 4-5% faster than 780.

Bring 6 GB VRAM as baseline for the high end plox.

Sounds like a waste of $ and power consumption. By the time games use more than 3GB of VRAM, GTX780/HD9970 will be way too slow. I don't think 6GB makes sense until we are in 2016/Volta generation. There are not that many games which are breaking the 2.5GB barrier. Which break 3GB?

 

[Imouto]

Sounds like a waste of $ and power consumption. By the time games use more than 3GB of VRAM, GTX780/HD9970 will be way too slow.

I wasn't talking about gaming.

 

[notty22]

I wasn't talking about gaming.

Let us all guess what you are talking about, so we can never discuss your post. lol


edit: I have seen posters state that Huma was coming to discrete cards this generation. It's not happening. We can't even get a new USB standard in a reasonable amount of time. Hardware vendors will not support a new technology when software will not quickly follow.

 

[Imouto]

Let us all guess what you are talking about, so we can never discuss your post. lol

Compute intensive stuff. In my case GPU rendering for 3D design being 3 GB the absolute minimum needed.

"buy a Tesla or FirePro" isn't an answer since any GTX or HD will beat them badly speed wise.

 

[Fastx]

If they going to target the 780 performance why not just go after the Titan? It would not be that be a big leap in performance once you get to/past the 780 performance to target the Titan performance. If going with a higher spec chip/larger die as been posted which some say a +30% looks possible on the "mature" 28nm which looks like they have the headroom to target the Titan performance.


Btw just for fun.
PR/TBL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbHpjz_TCh4&feature=youtu.be

 

[tviceman]

I don't remember that at all. There were rumours of HD6970 being a 1920 SP part but most of us dismissed those as unrealistic after seeing 6850/6870.

You must have been on vacation during that time then. That was when Silverforce started posting here (it was his grand entrance, with posts and threads prophetically proclaiming huge performance leaps) and many of the pro-AMD'rs ate it up and repeated it as gospel. I clearly remember Silverforce, Will, Mrk6, and Groover emphatically predicting it to be the new single gpu performance champ, and that was after the gtx580 came out. Anyways, like I said I think it will trade blows with GTX780, much in the same vein of 770 and 7970GE comparisons. And it will push Nvidia to release a gtx785 with slightly-better-than Titan performance (but with DP still heavily castrated). And then we'll be exactly where we were at 40nm with Nvidia having the top card about 15% faster than AMD's best and Nvidia's 2nd card trading blows with AMD's top card, except with higher prices across the board.

 

[tviceman]

If they going to target the 780 performance why not just go after the Titan? It would not be that be a big leap in performance once you get to/past the 780 performance to target the Titan performance. If going with a higher spec chip/larger die as been posted which some say a +30% looks possible on the "mature" 28nm which looks like they have the headroom to target the Titan performance.


Btw just for fun.
PR/TBL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbHpjz_TCh4&feature=youtu.be

Probably because the design of the chip was completed before/by the time Titan came out and/or GCN simply cannot attain that kind of performance without massive power draw.