Monday, May 7th 2012
AMD Readies Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition
AMD's Radeon HD 7970 could not hold on to the single-GPU performance crown for too long. It lost it to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, and the upcoming GeForce GTX 670 threatens to damage its competitiveness even further. Reports suggest that AMD is working on a new Tahiti-based graphics card SKU, the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. AMD unveiled the "GHz Edition" moniker to denote SKUs that come with engine clock speed ≥1 GHz. The new HD 7970 GHz Edition will come with reference core clock speed of 1050 MHz.
AMD needn't tinker with memory clock speed, as it already has a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface compared to the GeForce GTX 680 and its 256-bit memory bus width. Sources told Atomic PC that improved yields and manufacturing processes have benefitted Tahiti just as well as GK104, and ES Tahiti chips from the latest batches "easily" hit 1250 MHz core. These batches could make custom-design graphics cards with extremely high core clock speeds possible.
Sources:
Atomic PC, Engadget
AMD needn't tinker with memory clock speed, as it already has a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface compared to the GeForce GTX 680 and its 256-bit memory bus width. Sources told Atomic PC that improved yields and manufacturing processes have benefitted Tahiti just as well as GK104, and ES Tahiti chips from the latest batches "easily" hit 1250 MHz core. These batches could make custom-design graphics cards with extremely high core clock speeds possible.
203 Comments on AMD Readies Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition
Plus.....you can FIND a 7970. 680's are like catching leprechauns in the US.
An AMD 7970 was $549 at launch, but is now at $479 after the GTX 680 launched at $499.
Despite the fanboy bickering, the 680 vs 7970 had the 680 with 5-10% better and the 7970 5-10% better at other games, essentially going back and forth but with the 680 still doing it with lower power consumption. Fact is at the time, the 680 seem like a real value due to being $50 cheaper.
Today it is much different considering that people can hardly find a 680 for $499, even at $529 and up. Retailers are price gouging everywhere for a 680 up to $600 which isn't worth it.
I built a computer for a friend and was lucky to snag an HIS 7970 for $449. I myself was lucky to snag a Zotac GTX 680 for $400 off craigslist.
Either way, the consumers are getting the shaft in this whole ordeal.
AMD releasing a "GHz" edition is a bit pointless since pretty much every single 7970 can clock to 1ghz easy.
I'm not trying to say that the 680 is (much) better than the 7970 but that is the verdict.
What might be with this GHz edition is that they know the 670 will compete directly with the 925 Mhz 7970 and they have to break clear. This is just a supposition because I really don't see a point of a higher clocked 7970 by AMD.
GK104 in any shape and form is better than Tahiti and Pitcairn but AMD has the 7850 and if they price it competitively the 7870 in a space were NV has nothing. Of course availability for NV products is a big question right now.
1. At the moment, their "mid-range" GTX 680 is way cheaper to produce than the proposed GK110, and no doubt has much better yields.
2. They have yet to launch the rest of the lineup. Drivers are also yet to mature.
3. Why EOL your own products with a more expensive one when you can keep making the same one and gain much bigger profit margins?
4. There is very little demand for the current top of the line cards for REAL world usage. There is next to no demand for anything faster, since we have yet to find a game to push the capability of the current cards, let alone future GPUs.That's called microstuttering, and it happens as much on Nvidia cards as it does on AMD GPUs.
And what do you want to say to the people with SINGLE GTX 680s crashing/having poor performance in games? Both companies have crap drivers to begin with, and early adopters will always get shafted with driver problems, no matter what camp you're siding with, so your point is invalid.
Over here you can find 680s just as easily as 7970s. It's like they know that Asia is now the better market than the US.
Off topic i just put a A8 3870K +HD6670 system together and despite manys claims , stock it plays anything reasonably on med to low settings and still looked good, a 7970 at any speed(stck or 1Ghz) will spank any game at 1080p the average gamers res and even a 7850 will do a good job and i CAN buy one now ,i know who i thinks winning this gpu round.
the gk110 imho will be Nv's compute card, no great gfx leap but cuda fixed and i doubt well see it this year and it wont be a 6xx but the next alleged gen 7xx, Amd have got to have their 8xxx cooked or cooking by now
3 of your sources are quoting another of your sources and OBR is also one of the sources (and using same source from first reference). Semi Accurate gave the tape out info first and anand and wccf use it. Wccf is quite poor at info (i know I've often visited in the three months before kepler and all the stuff was way off base.)
OBR is a ludicrous site for info.
The fact is - there is no release date for a GK110 part. As far as NV PR are concerned it doesn't yet exist. What is apparent from the tech side is that GK104 is a gaming card with GPGPU very much depleted.
GK110 is an HPC (High Performance Computing) part. It should have been GK100 but as CD alludes to, it wouldn't work - it was a power draw monster. This is why GK 104 is so popular - it's efficient - but it's also generally shit at gpgpu.
The GTX 680 is an excellent card for gaming. The 7970 is an excellent card for gaming and gpgpu (if that floats your boat).
I also did calculations in another thread that clearly show the GTX 680's 37% faster clocks (compared to GTX 580) result in a 29% fps improvement. The 7970's 5.11% faster clocks (compared to 6970) result in a 41.56% fps improvement. One of these cards is an excellent architectural design improvement and one of these cards is clocked ridiculously higher than last gen (and gpgpu crippled).
img.techpowerup.org/120426/Untitled.png
A GHz 7970 might be good for PR but they'll need some fanfare to detract from the strange attraction the 680 has gathered. Yes the 680 is good but it's not THAT good.
And on the driver front - legendary crossfire problems but single card - pretty much none. Do we want to drag up Nvidias fan stopping card frying driver fuck up from a year or so back?
even its single precision performance is not much compared to the 7970
it folds bad:)
Point is people who own a 7970 are not in the market for a 680. That is where AMD f'ed it up - they sold fewer 7970's initially, and they let nvidia have a huge chunk of sales by keeping the 7970 so expensive, and not selling as many units as they could have (think back to the 5 series, where the market actually pushed the price UP from MSRP).
I am coming from the view of the consumer... just what I see. Never have i speculated about who makes more profit than who, nor do I care.
Open CL and compute is bad for the 680 but in shader performance it does well.
There is a $20 tax in Country A that isn't present in Country B. So to "equalize" the prices, it's $280 for Country A and $250 for Country B.
And Country B is a better market for Country A, looking from the supplier side???
I mean, after all, wouldn't that kind of be a selling feature for HD7970? IT does what GTX 680 cannot?
Personally, i think it's a lack or internal caches that are the issue ,and are also why it runs comparitively cool. Buty I do not hear suc hthings, I jsut hear peopel claiming it's slower.
Instead of confusing people with multiple variations of a GPU (standard edition and GHz edition) with the same name (HD 7970), with their old naming scheme they could have just bumped the speed and released the card with the 90 suffix as a 7x90 instead. Now they have to mess about because the dual GPU card will be the 7990.
Perhaps I'm being picky :laugh:, but it seems they caused more hassle in the past and present with the changed naming scheme than they did good.
BTW, I'm not a 20 year old kid with mid-40ties parents. I'll be 41 this summer. My parents are well into thier 60ties.
I think AMd's shader at these speeds is more effiecient and their polymorph and tesselation engines are ahead of nvidias ,they use less of them though