[SA] What is the latest on AMD’s Sea Islands? - Page 5

Will stay on topic of AMD Sea Islands and not CPU chips vs Intel.

I believe Charlie's 'more measuring' sources are more accurate with 15% performance gain. Sea Islands seems to be the 'tock' in 28nm architecture refined.

Current high end cards can take a pass.

Low end cards like the 7800's/7700's will have to wait and see if gaming gets more demanding as those cards, with varieid graphic settings, can handle BF3 currently. There's always the crossfire option for lower end cards to stay on top of their game. So regardless if the performance gains are 15% or closer to 30% it really dosen't matter.

The 6000 series owners should heavily consider Sea Islands as a great time to upgrade for a big jump in performance.

I will be looking forward to see if over clocking will have a higher or lower ratio with a refined 28nm card compared to current gen. As well as what position AMD will take with voltage locking graphic cards or not to take advantage of RMA savings.

Its looking more and more like I'll be waiting 3 generations to upgrade. OR .. I could wait another year and RMA my card and get a newer one for free.

That defies thermodynamics. Depends on your definition of "tock." If it's an architectural revision without a transistor shrinkage, then yes, SA is a tock. If it's some sort of measure of the number of architectural changes made, then no, it isn't a tock, as VLIW4 -> GCN was a larger change than GCN -> revised GCN, This is under the assumption that HD8000 will still be using a GCN derivative.

I don't like the idea of applying the "tick tock" terminology to GPUs, as it is a completely different beast compared to Intel's tick-tock.

With Intel, you have limited architectural changes and a transistor shrinkage for a tick. For a tock, you have an architectural revision without a transistor shrinkage. Tocks net the higher performance.

With GPUs, you (generally) have a new architecture on a new process for a "tick." This results in a tremendous increase in performance due to the increased parallelism, although performance per watt seems to suffer because of trying to manage the inherent troubles of a new architecture and a new fabrication process. Net performance per watt improves, but the point I am illustrating is that tackling each issue separately would be better if time were not a factor. Then you have a tock, which addresses the inefficiencies caused by tackling a new architecture and process at the same time. With GPUs, the tick actually provides more performance, because of the ability to add more cores.

So it defies conventional wisdom. Post-Cypress GPUs follow more of an AMD CPU strategy — new architecture on a new process, resulting in a lot of bloat (Bulldozer), then a revision to clean things up (Piledriver). Of course, this comparison only goes back as far as Bulldozer, as Phenom II was both a die shrink and a "cleanup."

TL;DR: I think applying "tick-tock" to GPUs is a bad idea. As a guy using HD6000, I'm definitely looking forward to it. I'm also looking forward to GTX700, as I'd like to see what both brands offer me feature-wise before I make a decision. Plus, prices will be lower that way, and I'll hopefully avoid launch driver headaches.

I don't think it's likely that I'll end up getting a GTX 700 series card though, because of the voltage locking. If there's affordable unlocked cards, I would definitely consider one, but that's unlikely. AMD will likely hold the compute advantage as well. At any rate, I won't be making up my mind until the cards are on the table.

wouldn't you say you need a cpu upgrade first dude lol? That bottleneck

we've been through this.. the guy actually isnt on a 9750 anymore.


HOWEVER Homles Im in the same boat as you. I would have upgraded this gen but the pricing was ridiculous and I didn't see the improvement I needed to justify that sort of cost. If this generation is 15% better that would be enough of a jump for me to almost buy in. DEPENDING on price. I dont usually overclock but I will turn my MSI AB voltage and speeds way up and wait for another generation if I have to.

I'm using an i5 750 right now. Sig rig is outdated.

There's an HD 9750????

Phenom 9750.

Er, on second thought, I should have PM'd this, rather than going further off topic.

15 Percent is not worth $500 owell will get another 7950 on black friday

15%-20% over the 7000 series sounds about right. If they overclock as well as the 7000 series then no need for worries, if they don't overclock well then they are a waste of time.