Monday, July 18th 2011
AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series to be PCI-Express 3.0 Compliant
AMD's next generation of graphics processors (GPUs) that will be branded under the HD 7000 series, are reported to be PCI-Express Generation 3 compliant. The desktop discrete graphics cards will feature PCI-Express 3.0 x16 bus interfaces, and will be fully backwards-compatible with older versions of the bus, including Gen 1 and Gen 2. Motherboards sold today feature Gen 2 PCI-E slots, although some of the very latest motherboards launched by major vendors feature PCI-Express 3.0 slots.
The new bus doubles the bandwidth over PCI-E 2.0, with 1 GB/s of bandwidth per lane, per direction. PCI-Express 3.0 x16 would have 32 GB/s (256 Gbps) of bandwidth at its disposal, 16 GB/s per direction. AMD's next generation of GPUs, codenamed "Southern Islands" will be built on the new 28 nm process at TSMC, and will upscale VLIW4 stream processors. Some of the first PC platforms to fully support PCI-Express 3.0 will be Intel's Sandy Bridge-E. Whether AMD's GPUs have hit a bandwidth bottleneck with PCI-E Gen 2, or is AMD trying to just be standards-compliant, is a different question altogether.
Source:
Donanim Haber
The new bus doubles the bandwidth over PCI-E 2.0, with 1 GB/s of bandwidth per lane, per direction. PCI-Express 3.0 x16 would have 32 GB/s (256 Gbps) of bandwidth at its disposal, 16 GB/s per direction. AMD's next generation of GPUs, codenamed "Southern Islands" will be built on the new 28 nm process at TSMC, and will upscale VLIW4 stream processors. Some of the first PC platforms to fully support PCI-Express 3.0 will be Intel's Sandy Bridge-E. Whether AMD's GPUs have hit a bandwidth bottleneck with PCI-E Gen 2, or is AMD trying to just be standards-compliant, is a different question altogether.
85 Comments on AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series to be PCI-Express 3.0 Compliant
Anyway, let's get back to topic.
after reading about their new compute unit shader design, Rage3d site goes and mentions 7xxx and vliw4 in the same paragraph, and no compute unit in sight, is this a continuation of the 2 tier gpu's ala barts/cayman with vliw4 in the mainstream and GCU's in the high end cards?
i only mentioned i wouldn't be able to use this card on xp ,which for me is a downer ,but this is progress
still i'd love to see how the devs of emulators could use this new tech ,obviously it won't be for some time yet, but i can't wait :D
Sure it might not impact the first cards much but most of us are using pci-e 2 instead of 1 for many reasons :-PI was thinking the same as more and more sites have reported about both the new compute unit and VLIW4 on the 7xxx cards, if it uses less space it would probably make sense to keep all of the bottom/low end on VLIW4 as it does pretty well and when made on 28nm I'm sure would lead to some pretty small, cool and cheap to produce low end or even mid range cards.
But as we don't really know much about the new architecture yet there could be many reasons to not use it on low end parts or VLIW4 could be part of the new architecture in some way or all the new cards could use the new compute architecture, i guess we just need many many more leaks. :laugh:
It works well on my Sig Setup but Gaming Performance lacks way behind XP cause NV only developed Drivers for XP and dropped the drivers they were making for Vista.