News: ATi going ahead with RadeonHD 6000 series.. this year
By
Father Xmas,
Posted on: 2010-07-15 17:30 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Looks like a sucky time to be investing in a new GPU or processor! I'm glad I (hopefully!) won't be investing in either for quite a while.
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Originally Posted by ShadowNate
;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!
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The other side of that coin, however, is that you can feel ok about buying one now and not worrying about a price drop a month after you bought it.
Loose --> not tight.
Lose --> Did not win, misplace, cannot find, subtract.
One extra 'o' makes a big difference.
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Murphy's Law dictates the moment YOU buy something (no, not the person beside you or 100's of friends) it will happen |
Originally Posted by White Hot Flash
The other side of that coin, however, is that you can feel ok about buying one now and not worrying about a price drop a month after you bought it.
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Seriously though - this has been a very disappointing time for video cards. The only consolation I have is that it favors AMD, who I prefer over Intel (even if its just emotionally).
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No, the other side of the coin is it's an awesome time if you bought a new one just before the stagnation began, because it'll be current for longer. |
Originally Posted by White Hot Flash
The other side of that coin, however, is that you can feel ok about buying one now and not worrying about a price drop a month after you bought it.
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(generally, there's price drops pretty frequently in the computer industry as long as there's no clearly superior player)
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Originally Posted by ShadowNate
;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!
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Well it was ATI's turn to announce something to counter nVidia's GTX 460 rollout, especially since it garnered a lot of positive reviews, besides dropping the MSRP of the HD 5830 down to $200 (which was the price most reviews of the HD 5830 said it should be).
I doubt the HD 6xxx series is going to be another doubling of the SPs but more likely a size reduction with was clock speed boost. They may beef up the tessellation engine since it appears that nVidia is winning that battle in Dx11 benchmarks. Also the HD 5xxx series seems to take more of a performance hit with AA on than nVidia's 4xx series.
Only time will tell.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
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The drop finally is showing up on Average Selling prices. |
Originally Posted by Father Xmas
Well it was ATI's turn to announce something to counter nVidia's GTX 460 rollout, especially since it garnered a lot of positive reviews, besides dropping the MSRP of the HD 5830 down to $200 (which was the price most reviews of the HD 5830 said it should be).
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I'm honestly not sure which I'd recommend buying if you only had $200 to spend. I still think Nvidia's driver support is the industries worst, and their *nix support is direction-less... but... bang for buck, the ability to overclock is a decided bonus over the 5830.
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I doubt the HD 6xxx series is going to be another doubling of the SPs but more likely a size reduction with was clock speed boost. They may beef up the tessellation engine since it appears that nVidia is winning that battle in Dx11 benchmarks. Also the HD 5xxx series seems to take more of a performance hit with AA on than nVidia's 4xx series. Only time will tell. |
Beyond that... well... anything is anybody's guess. I agree that AMD just won't double the SP's and call it a day. AMD's engineering process has largely been "think laterally." Across recent processors and GPU's AMD has approached their design with limits on power consumption. E.G. the RadeonHD 5000 series was designed to use the same amount of power as RadeonHD 4000 series cards, but roughly doubled the performance within that power envelope.
Nvidia's GPU design since the 8000 series has basically been mega-chip, with a philosophy of throwing transistors at the problem, regardless of power draw, heat-output, or anything else. It's a good way to win ultimate performance crowns, but it sure hasn't materialized as an effective long-term business strategy. Granted, Intel could have told them about that after the Pentium4 Emergency Editions.
I think the only concrete guess I can make about the chip is that AMD is going to rework the memory controller yet again. Case in point, the RadeonHD 4850. It's texture and shader engines are nowhere near as massive as the Nvidia GTS 250, but the AMD GPU is far more efficient, and can expose more of it's available power. The result is that the HD 4850 can compete with the GTS 250.
Still, it's all conjecture.
For all I know, the 6000 series will be another dog, offering nothing over the existing 5000 series cards.
Well the GF104 is a sleeker, smaller chip than the original Fermi with considerably lower power requirements, similar to the ATI's previous GPU in the HD 48xx line. Word is that nVidia is doing a redesign of the full size Fermi GPU so we may end up seeing the dual GF104 board in future.
As it stands right now, the 1GB GTX460 pretty much replaces the whole GTX 2xx series in performance at a very attractive price, fixing the problem with an aging line. Now if they can fill in the gap between the GT 240 and the 768MB GTX 460 the the HD 5670/5750/5770 is filling.
See, I rather have competition at every price/performance point from both of them than one sitting back owning the market the way nVidia did while ATI was struggling with the HD 2000 and 3000 series. It was only when ATI risk aiming to make a Mustang rather than a Ferrari which then caught nVidia napping. Note that it was only 13 months between introduction of the HD 2900XT and the HD 4870 with 2.5x the SP number crunching power.
Same thing happened with AMD and Intel back during the dark days of the Pentium 4/D. The Athlon 64 and X2 were superior CPUs but they were also caught napping when the Core 2 came out of left field (from the laptop CPU design team) and leapfrogged AMD.
The result of both of these turnabouts was a quick round of price slashing that were great for us.
Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
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Heaven knows it needs a redesign. Fermi's biggest problem, to me admittedly, is that it was created as a General Purpose GPU rather than a Graphics GPU. A refocused design could shed off lots of the transistors that really only matter if you use OpenCL to leverage Fermi as a processor. |
Originally Posted by Father Xmas
Well the GF104 is a sleeker, smaller chip than the original Fermi with considerably lower power requirements, similar to the ATI's previous GPU in the HD 48xx line. Word is that nVidia is doing a redesign of the full size Fermi GPU so we may end up seeing the dual GF104 board in future.
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I think this is why the GTX 460 is such a great card.
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| As it stands right now, the 1GB GTX460 pretty much replaces the whole GTX 2xx series in performance at a very attractive price, fixing the problem with an aging line. Now if they can fill in the gap between the GT 240 and the 768MB GTX 460 the the HD 5670/5750/5770 is filling. |
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See, I rather have competition at every price/performance point from both of them than one sitting back owning the market the way nVidia did while ATI was struggling with the HD 2000 and 3000 series. It was only when ATI risk aiming to make a Mustang rather than a Ferrari which then caught nVidia napping. Note that it was only 13 months between introduction of the HD 2900XT and the HD 4870 with 2.5x the SP number crunching power. Same thing happened with AMD and Intel back during the dark days of the Pentium 4/D. The Athlon 64 and X2 were superior CPUs but they were also caught napping when the Core 2 came out of left field (from the laptop CPU design team) and leapfrogged AMD. The result of both of these turnabouts was a quick round of price slashing that were great for us. |
Reported here: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1533011
Referenced here: http://www.funkykit.com/the-news/1-l...hong-kong.html
Taken down from here: http://www.funkykit.com/articles/434...hong-kong.html
Seems like somebody from HIS may have said something they weren't supposed to. AMD's been talking about a product refresh on the RadeonHD 5000 series, well, since the 5000 series launched. AMD wound up not needing that refresh since Nvidia's Fermi... well. Sucks. As of right now, only one of Nvidia's graphics cards is competitive with AMD offerings, the Geforce GTX 460. Only problem with the 460, as I've heard, is that Nvidia's having to do the same thing they did with the GTX 200 series... sell the chip for a loss. The 460 can indeed be had for it's $199 price point, and as far as gamers are concerned, it's a worthy alternative to the RadeonHD 5830. Also overclocks better than a 5830. Not sure if it's a good business strategy for Nvidia to keep selling chips for less than they cost to make though...
Anyways, since Nvidia hasn't been able to bring anything to the market that hasn't had the subtitle Rip off of the year, AMD hasn't really had to move prices on their hardware, something third party vendors have appreciated. AMD also hasn't really had to move on product refreshes. The RadeonHD 5870 is still the flagship single chip model, and has been for almost 10 months.
Now though, it seems that AMD won't be moving on any product refreshes of the RadeonHD 5000 series. Rather, AMD will go straight for the next 6000 series of graphics cards... this winter quarter. What we don't know about the 6000 series is, well, everything.
The short term effect is that graphics cards prices won't be falling anytime soon. Nvidia genuinely can't afford to lower prices on their graphics cards as their business strategy right now is to largely buy time and marketshare, and hope TSMC can get a die shrink in on the Fermi hardware that will lower production costs and make the GTX 4xx series profitable.
AMD won't be into lowering prices either. Nobody at AMD is going to claim that Phenom II is a real answer for the Intel I7. Phenom II is still largely using the same architecture from the 2003 Athlon64, and AMD's next processor architecture isn't due till 2011, the so-called Bulldozer. With a processor market that only plays well in the mid-range and low-end, AMD will likely ride the current GPU prices as far as they can, maximizing profits, maybe making minor shifts on the RadeonHD 5830.
What this means is that if you want to buy a graphics card before Christmas, you can be pretty sure that the prices today will remain stable for the next few months. Don't expect any steep discounts, rebates, or cuts from AMD or Nvidia over their chips till December.