Wednesday, May 8th 2013
AMD's Answer to GeForce GTX 700 Series: Volcanic Islands
GPU buyers can breathe a huge sigh of relief that AMD isn't fixated with next-generation game consoles, and that its late-2013 launch of its next GPU generation is with good reason. The company is building a new GPU micro-architecture from the ground up. Codenamed "Volcanic Islands," with members codenamed after famous islands along the Pacific Ring of Fire, the new GPU family sees AMD rearranging component-hierarchy within the GPU, in a big way.
Over the past three GPU generations that used VLIW5, VLIW4, and Graphics CoreNext SIMD architectures, the component hierarchy was essentially untouched. According to an early block-diagram of one of the GPUs in the series, codenamed "Hawaii," AMD will designate parallel and serial computing units. Serial cores based on either of the two architectures AMD is licensed to use (x86 and ARM), could handle part of the graphics processing load. The stream processors of today make up the GPU's parallel processing machinery.
We can't make out text in the rather blurry block-diagram, but are rather convinced that if it's authentic, then AMD is making some big changes. Another reason for AMD's delay could be silicon fab process. "Tahiti" as implemented on Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, already poses high thermal envelope. AMD doesn't want the 28 nm process to restrict its next-generation architecture development, and is holding out till the 20 nm process is in place at TSMC. The fab set Q4 as its tentative bulk manufacturing date for the process.
The source that leaked the block-diagram also posted specifications of the chip that's codenamed "Hawaii," which appears to be the flagship part.
Source:
ChipHell
Over the past three GPU generations that used VLIW5, VLIW4, and Graphics CoreNext SIMD architectures, the component hierarchy was essentially untouched. According to an early block-diagram of one of the GPUs in the series, codenamed "Hawaii," AMD will designate parallel and serial computing units. Serial cores based on either of the two architectures AMD is licensed to use (x86 and ARM), could handle part of the graphics processing load. The stream processors of today make up the GPU's parallel processing machinery.
We can't make out text in the rather blurry block-diagram, but are rather convinced that if it's authentic, then AMD is making some big changes. Another reason for AMD's delay could be silicon fab process. "Tahiti" as implemented on Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, already poses high thermal envelope. AMD doesn't want the 28 nm process to restrict its next-generation architecture development, and is holding out till the 20 nm process is in place at TSMC. The fab set Q4 as its tentative bulk manufacturing date for the process.
The source that leaked the block-diagram also posted specifications of the chip that's codenamed "Hawaii," which appears to be the flagship part.
- 20 nm silicon fab process
- 4096 stream processors
- 16 serial processor cores
- 4 geometry engines
- 256 TMUs
- 64 ROPs
- 512-bit GDDR5 memory interface
145 Comments on AMD's Answer to GeForce GTX 700 Series: Volcanic Islands
not sure why...just how ive been doing it sincebeenpimpn!!!
4850 to 460 than sli to 6970 than crossfire to 670 now sli....
but this one could get expensive.....
twitter.com/ST_Cyclone/status/332119099121479681/photo/1
ARM Cortex Co-processor, ECC ram are interesting, but what blew me away was the Hyper-transport links! :twitch: pleeeeease tell me this will aid/accelerate the PCI-E bottleneck!
It appears to me that AMD is really ramping the good products that they have had in development for years be it GPU or CPU/APU models. This is nice to see and good for consumers.
Will a micro-architecture change like this dramatically affect the approach you have to take for supporting this in GPU-Z?
If this is the course AMD is on they have been working on this for more than year... But it's hard to know how well this can be pulled off on 20Nm. Had they said 28Nm I would've seen this as simple, but to complicate it on a TSMC shrink. :twitch:
But you can kind of feel how the camps are liking or disliking this 20Nm.
www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20130404143508_TSMC_Is_Ahead_of_Its_Own_20nm_Roadmap_Report.html
www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-unhappy-with-tsmc-claims-22nm-essentially-worthlessThe code name is just "Volcanic Islands". Not sure who else is actual fixating on "Pacific Ring of Fire", maybe just btarunr at this point... Hawaii Islands were formed by a volcano the last I heard.
For example GTX 680 has 8 of these "processing cores", GTX 690 has 16, GeForce TITAN has 14 enabled (from a total of 15).
All the other bling-blings, they are reserved for the "professional" FirePro series and will most likely be disabled for the mainstream Radeon series.
The good news is that it looks like a card that could compete against GTX 690. The bad news is that it's not actually going to compete against GTX 690, but something new, much more powerful, NVIDIA's next (next) gen.
I honestly prefer this 2 year refresh cycle - I'd rather see substantive improvements ever 2-3 years than incremental improvements every 12-16 months.
nVidia's term "SMX" is their marketing name for blocks stream processors (shader units, ALU's...etc.) Building block with its own front end (rasterizer) and back end (ROPS). And they are massively parallel processors. ;)
Serial Units Above, are from their name; Serial. and AMD has two "serial" architecture licenses, x86 and ARM, and its not hard to guess which they opted for :D
I would expect them to do something more like match the Titan, i.e. 7970 + 40% performance.
Add in some overhead, and we're back at 2x 7970(with a major grain of salt)
sooo, 2x 7970 doesnt sound that far off(as said with a major grain of salt).
www.flickr.com/photos/8091090@N02/8006861851/in/photostream/
So it could either actually be really old news, or a fake.
There is never enough powaah!! Yes even at 1080P and newer titles. ;)
Although im a bit confused about this part
16 serial processor units
4 geometry engines
So in reality it will have 16*4 = 64 CU?I read it once that AMD has 3 fabs to chose from and there wont be any delays because of it.
this slide might be a pipedream of some chinese forum user who's laughing his ass off now
Imo VI vs GK110 is like GK110 vs GF110, if not even a bigger gap.
Goddamn you ATi/AMD! :banghead: Hopefully i can still fetch a pretty penny for my 5870 when these drop so it would make transitioning a little easier... :rolleyes:
5870 - Out of 775 sys. and for sale or donate to relative, or just add to my GPU collection :twitch:
7950 - Out of 1155 sys. and into 775 sys.
8950? - Into 1155 sys.
Sounds good! :rockout:
GFX makers; Give me MoBo style GFX solution! One board, with swappable GPUs! :pimp: