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HD 6970 - finally something

swing848swing848 Member UncommonPosts: 292

Read up on the HD 6970 here http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/item/20953-amd-cayman-further-detailed  Click on the slides link at bottom of the article.

The information is good, the problem is, there is very little of it.  At this date I would have hoped that AMD would have lifted it's TBD.  It is late in the year, nVidea has already released the GTX 580.  What is AMD waiting on?  At least provide specs.

I doubt that AMD has more work to do in silicon, so my question is, if AMD released more information will people believe that nVidea's best will be a better card and those people waiting for the HD 6970 will jump on the GTX 580?

I do not know the answer because AMD is not talking.  If AMD is not talking, anything on paper, I am beginning to wonder if the product will launch this year at all.  The only viable reason for the delay that I can understand is the fab plant is unable to provide good yields, and that will mean both delays and higher cost.  How can AMD cut cost on a part with very low yields. 

And, speaking of costs, Obama's planned price hikes and higher taxes go into effect after the end of this year.  With a weak dollar I do not know how prices will be able to go down.  Weak dollar and low yields do not sound like it will be easy for any company to reduce prices.  Probably the biggest factor that might help keep prices low for a while is the fact that so many millions of people are out of work and many millions of others are thinking about holding on to what money they have, because of the bleak [miserable] economic and job outlook.

I do not think TSMC has done anyone any favors with delays. 

Even with all of the gloom, no 32nm, and lately, poor 40nm yields I am still interested in what the HD 6970 will look like and how it will perform.

 

EDIT:  A typo fixed.  Sorry, I did not check this post for spelling.

Intel Core i7 7700K, MB is Gigabyte Z270X-UD5
SSD x2, 4TB WD Black HHD, 32GB RAM, MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning LE video card

Comments

  • KabaalKabaal Member UncommonPosts: 3,042

    Originally posted by swing848

    Probably the biggest factor that might help keep prices low for a while is the fact that so many millions of people are out of work and many millions of others are thinking about holding on to what money they have, because of the bleak [miserable] economic and job outlook.

     

    The problem with that statement is that those who buy the top end cards are not likely to be affected by any current economic problems, or even any monetary problems whatsoever. The top end is for the enthusiasts with disposable income which means they can afford to keep quiet about it, enthusiasts will happily wait for benchmarks to appear slowly.

     

    Mid range is the only area that they need and know that they need to be forthcoming on as the buyers in that range are frugal and looking for bang per buck.

     

    Edit - We all typo!

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347

    "If AMD is not talking, anything on paper, I am beginning to wonder if the product will launch this year at all."

    The official word from AMD as of two weeks ago is that it will launch this year.

    http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9Njk3NTh8Q2hpbGRJRD0tMXxUeXBlPTM=&t=1

    See page 21 of that presentation.  If AMD was knowingly lying to investors, they could get in big, big trouble for it.  See what happened to Enron for lying to investors.  And they kind of had to know by then whether it would launch that year, as if they didn't already have properly working silicon back and a large production run at least well underway at TSMC, there is no way that they could have gotten the parts out this year.

    Furthermore, if it launches too late in the year, that will alienate quite a few people.  If you launch between Christmas and New Year's Day, you're telling review sites that they need to spend Christmas benchmarking video cards.  That's not a way to get a favorable review.  If you launch a few days before Christmas, then the reasonable card to buy when someone purchases a present may no longer be reasonable when the present is opened.  That leads to lots of returns, and retailers hate that and won't stock your cards if you do things to alienate them too often.

    It's not a fluke that Clarkdale, Arrandale, Redwood, and the mobile versions of Evergreen all launched in early to mid January this year.  They might well have been ready for launch in late December, but even if so, Intel and AMD would have held off on the official launch date.  It's likewise not a fluke that Sandy Bridge and Bobcat are both going to launch in early to mid January next year, and the mobile versions of Northern Islands likely will, too.

    -----

    "The only viable reason for the delay that I can understand is the fab plant is unable to provide good yields, and that will mean both delays and higher cost."

    Low yields are extremely improbable.  AMD demonstrably has good yields on a number of other chips based on TSMC's 40 nm bulk silicon process.  Look how small the gap between Radeon HD 5750 and 5770 prices are, for example; they don't have that many defective Juniper chips coming off the lines that need to go into a lower bin.  Now, Cayman will surely be a lot bigger than the ~170 mm^2 Juniper chip, but AMD seems to have pretty good yields on the 334 mm^2 Cypress chip, too.  It simply isn't plausible that AMD has forgotten how TSMC's 40 nm process works, more than a year and a half after they launched their first product on it (the Radeon HD 4770, which genuinely did have yield problems).  Neither is it plausible that TSMC has suddenly forgotten how to fab chips on what is by now a mature process node.

    Furthermore, yield problems have to be fixed long before release.  It takes a couple of months for silicon to go through the full process at the fabs alone, and then more time for board vendors to assemble and ship parts.  You don't order a large volume production run of the sort needed to publicly launch a part until you know that the yields are good.

    Well, maybe you take a risk if you're behind, think the next spin will probably be fine, and are in a mad rush to catch up.  But AMD isn't trailing behind Nvidia.  Cypress still crushes GF104.  Barts handily beats GF106.   Redwood still annihilates GF108.  For that matter, Barts even beats GF104, and Juniper even beats GF106.  When your product targeted at one market segment beats your competitor's product targeted at a higher market segment in raw performance, you're way, way ahead.  That some will think Cayman is a failure if it can't beat GF110 on raw performance, in spite of almost surely being much smaller and much cheaper, merely reinforces this point.  (On the other hand, if Cayman can't beat the rumored GF114 that is likely to launch early next year and is it's natural competitor on cost, then that might well constitute losing.)

    Yeah, AMD doesn't have an answer for GF110 right now, except perhaps for Hemlock or a pair of Barts in CrossFire.  But GF110 is aimed at the high end market segment that AMD intended to vacate and cede to Nvidia, with AMD offering only token competition from CrossFire setups.  That it took Nvidia over a year after the card should have launched to finally fill that market segment isn't reason for AMD to be cowering in fear.  They're probably laughing at Nvidia's problems.

    There are other, more plausible rumors about the delay on Cayman.  One is that the Cayman cards need some particular part from a vendor that hasn't been able to supply enough of them.  Another is that AMD is having driver problems, which could easily happen with a major new architecture.

    -----

    "What is AMD waiting on? At least provide specs."

    A lot of people in the tech industry are still terrified of the ghost of Adam Osborne.  The story goes that Osborne Computer Corporation was selling some particular computer in the early 1980s, and it was selling pretty well.  Then Adam Osborne went around telling people that its successor was going to be really awesome.  So consumers were like, I guess we shouldn't buy the current one, but should wait for the successor, and sales of the units that had already launched plummeted.  Meanwhile, the next generation was delayed, so the company had little revenue for a while, and it ended up driving them out of business.

    The idea is, if you've got good parts on the market that are selling well, you want people to buy those parts.  You don't want to tell them, don't buy from us today, but wait to buy something better in the future.  At best, you still get the same revenue from the same people, but only later.  But you also risk telling people to wait, and then they do wait, and then when they're sick of waiting, they decide that a competitor's product is a better deal--in which case, you lose revenue.

    The only way that you want to tell people to wait is if you're behind, and you think they'd buy a competitor's product, in which case you try to convince them to wait until your product will be a better deal.  Nvidia did a lot of that, with trying to make it sound like Fermi was coming sooner than it was, as they knew that nearly everyone who wanted to buy a video card for significantly over $100 late last year was going to buy from AMD.  Once Intel launches Sandy Bridge, AMD might likewise feel more pressure to start talking up Bulldozer.  But the only Nvidia card on the market that AMD doesn't handily destroy is the GeForce GTX 580, but that's a low volume part, and even there, it's debatable whether that's better than a Radeon HD 5970 or two Radeon HD 6870s in CrossFire, for the same total price as the GTX 580.

    Recall that until the day that Barts launched, AMD wouldn't even publicly acknowledge that it existed.  The nearest to that that I can think of is some occasional, oblique comments saying that they were going to refresh their lineup this year, which is the sort of thing that one could easily guess without confirmation from AMD, as they try to refresh their lineup every year.  A lot of information leaked out early, of course, but it was mixed in with false information, so people didn't really know what to expect.

    Furthermore, it's rumored that Nvidia will try to launch a press edition factory overclocked GeForce GTX 580 to compete with Cayman.  That is, they tried to repeat the GTX 460 FTW stunt that they pulled with Barts.  They convinced a decent number of disreputable review sites that, instead of comparing the stock Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 to stock GeForce GTX 460 (all variants) and 470s, they should compare them to the EVGA GTX 460 FTW, a very low volume, extremely heavily overclocked part with extra specially binned cards sent to reviewers.  That way, instead of disreputable reviewers concluding that a GTX 460 1 GB performed about as well as a Radeon HD 6850, they said that an extremely heavily overclocked GTX 460 performed about as well as a stock Radeon HD 6870.  Some of the reasons why that isn't a clean comparison should be obvious.

    If Nvidia is trying to send reviewers a press edition, factory overclocked GeForce GTX 580 to compete with the Radeon HD 6970, then AMD doesn't want to give Nvidia a clear target to shoot for.

  • MokweeMokwee Member Posts: 286

    Originally posted by Quizzical

    Furthermore, if it launches too late in the year, that will alienate quite a few people.  If you launch between Christmas and New Year's Day, you're telling review sites that they need to spend Christmas benchmarking video cards.  That's not a way to get a favorable review.  If you launch a few days before Christmas, then the reasonable card to buy when someone purchases a present may no longer be reasonable when the present is opened.  That leads to lots of returns, and retailers hate that and won't stock your cards if you do things to alienate them too often.

    I admit I got 2 paragraphs in before I threw up. Your stating in your opinion that depending on the time of year and how close it would be to said reviewee's religious holiday (not everyone celebrates christmas OP, little bit close minded I think) it would directly affect the "score of the review"???

    I dont want to give the time of day to a site that works like that (ie. gamespot gives good reviews only to publishers who pay them the most money, ITS PROVEN DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH). Then again if its your personal opinion and you work for a site that does reviews, please tell me which one to avoid.

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347

    Originally posted by Mokwee

    I admit I got 2 paragraphs in before I threw up. Your stating in your opinion that depending on the time of year and how close it would be to said reviewee's religious holiday (not everyone celebrates christmas OP, little bit close minded I think) it would directly affect the "score of the review"???

    I don't know where you live, but in the United States, Christmas is a federal holiday that nearly everyone gets off of work.  A large fraction of businesses shut down entirely for a lot longer than just one day, sometimes extending all the way to New Year's Day.  Even people who aren't religiously observant are likely to take time off to meet with extended families around that time.  I'm guessing that a good fraction of reviewers would like to do so, too.

    Now, will they grade a card down on that basis?  Not necessarily.  But they surely won't be happy about it.  And gratuitously angering the people who are about to offer their opinions of your product isn't a smart thing to do.  It's kind of like how it just isn't smart to turn in a homework assignment with a long diatribe on the first page about how evil the grader is.

  • noquarternoquarter Member Posts: 1,170


    Originally posted by swing848
    Read up on the HD 6970 here http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/item/20953-amd-cayman-further-detailed

    Unfortunately fudzilla is full of shit, least reliable rumor site out there.



    And, speaking of costs, Obama's planned price hikes and higher taxes go into effect after the end of this year.

    Wow, planned price hikes? Higher taxes? Do you even know what you're talking about? The tax 'hikes' are a sunset of the tax cuts from 10 years ago. The Democratic majority's 'plan' is to extend them for everyone making < $250,000 a year, and allow the > $250,000 a year cuts to expire as written in the original bill.

    The stimulus package already included a tax break for everyone making < $95,000 a year. You are likely paying less or the same in taxes right now than you were under Bush. If you end up paying more after the > $250,000 cuts expire, you're the kind of person that can afford the new video card regardless.

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347

    Originally posted by noquarter

    The stimulus package already included a tax break for everyone making < $95,000 a year. You are paying less in taxes right now than you were even under Bush. If you end up paying more after the > $250,000 cuts expire, you're the kind of person that can afford the new video card regardless.

    What tax rates did they cut again?  A $400 welfare check from the IRS is a spending increase, not a tax cut--and it doesn't matter that it comes from the IRS rather than HHS.  Lots of new taxes were included in Obamacare, and they tried to push some massive new taxes in their "cap and trade" bill that now appears dead.  And their "plan" to only hike taxes on high income people (e.g., those who can hire employees) is so much their plan that they can't even bother to introduce it for a vote in either house of congress, in spite of having large majorities.

    But this is getting way off topic.

    "Unfortunately fudzilla is full of shit, least reliable rumor site out there."

    Not quite.  Bright Side of News* is worse.  Besides, even with Fudzilla, there's also a difference between Fuad's articles (which are useless) and those written by other writers.

    The link to the slides is an external link to slides that have been passed around the Internet a fair bit.  I thought the slides looked like they were probably real.

  • noquarternoquarter Member Posts: 1,170


    Originally posted by Quizzical
    What tax rates did they cut again?  A $400 welfare check from the IRS is a spending increase, not a tax cut--and it doesn't matter that it comes from the IRS rather than HHS.  Lots of new taxes were included in Obamacare, and they tried to push some massive new taxes in their "cap and trade" bill that now appears dead.  And their "plan" to only hike taxes on high income people (e.g., those who can hire employees) is so much their plan that they can't even bother to introduce it for a vote in either house of congress, in spite of having large majorities.
    But this is getting way off topic.

    The issue in the post wasn't about how to fix the economy through taxation, and you're right I definitely don't want to go off topic into that discussion. It was simply about whether Obama was stopping you from buying a video card because of 'price hikes' and 'higher taxes', which are both completely false. You can call the stimulus tax credit whatever you want but that $400 check is the cost of a video card. Obama doesn't control prices of video cards and the higher taxes on > $250,000 isn't going to stop those people from purchasing one.


    And yea BSoN is pretty bad too, but I always see Fuad out there with erroneous information. I was just being flippant about Fudzilla because I don't trust that site, but agreed after looking at the slides they look like the more recent legit ones.


    Also, I wish they would update the forum software on this site so it doesn't reformat my quotes all the time :(

  • KabaalKabaal Member UncommonPosts: 3,042

    Originally posted by noquarter

     




    Originally posted by swing848

    Read up on the HD 6970 here http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/item/20953-amd-cayman-further-detailed



    Unfortunately fudzilla is full of shit, least reliable rumor site out there.

     




    And, speaking of costs, Obama's planned price hikes and higher taxes go into effect after the end of this year.


    Wow, planned price hikes? Higher taxes? Do you even know what you're talking about? The tax 'hikes' are a sunset of the tax cuts from 10 years ago. The Democratic majority's 'plan' is to extend them for everyone making < $250,000 a year, and allow the > $250,000 a year cuts to expire as written in the original bill.

    The stimulus package already included a tax break for everyone making < $95,000 a year. You are likely paying less or the same in taxes right now than you were under Bush. If you end up paying more after the > $250,000 cuts expire, you're the kind of person that can afford the new video card regardless.

    Hes just copy/pasta'ing from other sites.

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