AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs
by Ryan Smith on September 23, 2009 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Meet the Rest of the Evergreen Family
Somewhere on the way to Cypress, AMD’s small die strategy got slightly off-track.
AMD’s small-die strategy for RV770
Cypress is 334mm2, compared to 260mm2 for RV770. In that space they can pack 2.15 billion transistors, versus 956 million on the RV770, and come out at a load power of 188W versus 160W on the RV770. AMD called 256mm2 their sweet spot for the small die strategy, and Cypress missed that sweet spot.
The cost of missing the sweet spot is that by missing the size, they’re missing the price. The Cypress cards are $379 and $259, compared to $299 and $199 that the original small die strategy dictated. This has resulted in a hole in the Evergreen family, which is why we’re going to see one more member than usual.
As Cypress is the base chip, there are 4 designs and 3 different chips that will be derived from it. Above Cypress is Hemlock, which will be the requisite X2 part using a pair of Cypress cores. Hemlock is going to be interesting to watch not just for its performance, but because by missing their sweet spot, AMD is running a bit hot. A literal pair of 5870s is 376W, which is well over the 300W limit of a 6-pin + 8-pin power configuration. AMD saves some power in a single card (which is how they got the 4870 under the limit) but it likely won’t be enough. We’ll be keeping an eye on this matter to see what AMD ends up doing to get Hemlock out the door at the right power load. As scheduled we should see Hemlock before the end of the year, although given the supply problems for Cypress that we mentioned earlier, it’s going to be close.
The “new” member of the Evergreen family is Juniper, a part born out of the fact that Cypress was too big. Juniper is the part that’s going to let AMD compete in the <$200 category that the 4850 was launched in. It’s going to be a cut-down version of Cypress, and we know from AMD’s simulation testing that it’s going to be a 14 SIMD part. We would wager that it’s going to lose some ROPs too. As AMD does not believe they’re particularly bandwidth limited at this time with GDDR5, we wouldn’t be surprised to see a smaller bus too (perhaps 192bit?). Juniper based cards are expected in the November timeframe.
Finally at the bottom we have Redwood and Cedar, the Evergreen family’s compliments to RV710 and RV730. These will be the low-end parts derived from Cypress, and will launch in Q1 of 2010. All told, AMD will be launching 4 chips in less than 6 months, giving them a top-to-bottom range of DX11 parts. The launch of 4 chips in such a short time frame is something their engineering staff is very proud of.
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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
We do have Cyberlink's software, but as it uses different code paths, the results are near-useless for a hardware review. Any differences could be the result of hardware differences, or it could be that one of the code paths is better optimized. We would never be able to tell.Our focus will always be on benchmarking the same software on all hardware products. This is why we bent over backwards to get something that can use DirectCompute, as it's a standard API that removes code paths/optimizations from the equation (in this case we didn't do much better since it was a NVIDIA tech demo, but it's still an improvement).
DukeN - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
I have one of these and I know it outperforms the GTX 280 but not sure what it'd be like against one of these puppies.dagamer34 - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
I need my bitstream Dolby Digital TrueHD/DTS HD Master Audio bistreaming codecs!!! :)ew915 - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
I don't see this beating the GT300 as for so it should beat the GTX295 by a great margin.tamalero - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
dood, you forgot the 295 is a DUAL CHIP?SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
roflmao - Gee no more screaming the 4850x2 and the 4870x2 are best without pointing out the two gpu's needed to get there.--
Nonetheless, this 5870 is EPIC FAIL, no matter what - as we see the disappointing numbers - we all see them, and it's not good.
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Problem is, Nvidia has the MIMD multiple instructions breakthrough technology never used before that according to reports is an AWESOME advantage, lus they are moving to DDR5 with a 512 bit bus !
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So what is in the works is an absolute WHOMPING coming down on ati that BIG GREEN NVIDIA is going to deliver, and the poor numbers here from what was hoped for and hyped over (although even PREDICTED by the red fan Derek himself in one portion of one sorrowful and despressed sentence on this site) are just one step closer to that nail in the coffin...
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Yes I sure hope ati has something major up it's sleeve, like 512 bit mem bus increased card coming, the 5870Xmem ...
I find the speculation that ATI "mispredicted" the bandwidth needs to be utter non-sense. They are 2-3 billion in the hole from the last few years with "all these great cards" they still lose $ on every single sale, so they either cannot go higher bit width, or they don't want to, or they are hiding it for the next "strike at NVidia" release.
erple2 - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
So you're comparing this product with a not yet release product and saying that the not yet released product is going to trounce it, without any facts to back it up? Do you have the hardware? If not, then you're simply ranting.Will the GT300 beat out the 5870? I dunno, probably. If it didn't, that would imply that the move from GT200 to GT300 was a major disappointment for NVidia.
I think that EPIC FAIL is completely ludicrous. I can see "epic fail" applied to the Geforce FX series when it came out. I can also see "epic fail" for the Radeon MAXX back in the day. But I don't see the 5870 as "epic fail". If you look at the card relative to the 4870 (the card it replaces), it's quite good - solid 30% increase. That's what I would expect from a generation improvement (that's what the gt200's did over the 9800's, and what the 8800 did over the 7900, etc).
BTW, I'm seeing the 5870 as pretty good - it beats out all single card NVidia by a reasonable and measureable amount. Sounds like ATI has done well. Or are you considering anything less than 2x the performance of the NVidia cards "epic fail"? In that case, you may be disappointed with the GT300, as well. In fact, I'll say that the GT300 is a total fail right now. I mean jeez! It scores ZERO FPS in every benchmark! That's super-epic fail. And I have the numbers to back that statement up.
Since you are making claims about the epic fail nature of the 5870 based on yet to be released hardware, I can certainly play the same game, and epic fail anything you say based on those speculative musings.
SiliconDoc - Monday, September 28, 2009 - link
Well the GT200 was 60.96% increase average. AT says so.http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3334...">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3334...
So, I guess ati lost this round terribly, as NVidia's last just beat them by more than double your 30%.
Great, EPIC FAIL is correct, I was right, and well...
Finally - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Team Green foames out of their mouthes. It's funny to watch.SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Glad you are having fun.Just let me know when you disagree, and why. I'm certain your fun will be "gone then", since reality will finally take hold, and instead of you seeing foam, I'll be seeing drool.