That implies everyone knows the original card had <448 cores though.
I'm not implying AMD are free from it ether, they frequently rebrand low-end and mobile GPUs.
Edit: missed 3 posts, gimme a min...
You tend to assume though that suffixes are good, more suffixes or higher numbers indicate a better card. This is why I agree with CAT that the 560 SE was a dodgy choice of name, because "SE" sounds like a good thing to those not in the know.
Agreed the different memory versions of GPUs is especially confusing, back with 5000 you could have one card paired with DDR2, GDDR3, GDDR5, with more potentially more difference between them in games than a neighbouring GPU.
Personally I never assume suffixes are good, they can just as easily refer to a cut-down version.
AFAIK GTX555 and GTX560SE seem to be more or less the same:
http://www.geforce.co.uk/hardware/de...specifications
http://www.techpowerup.com/162296/ZO...TX-560-SE.html
Basically there is 30MHZ clockspeed difference. However,this means the GTX560SE is less a GTX560 and more a GTX555.
Then Nvidia has its OEM cards being different specifications than its retail card. That is another issue,because someone buying a prebuilt PC might look at reviews for retail cards,to see what card to choose during configuration.
I think the naming people for AMD,Nvidia and Intel should be given a slap with a wet fish.
They can only be on drugs,to make such tedious naming schemes.
The thing that really gets me with the new '7870' is that AMD have plenty of perfectly sensible names available. Everything between 7870 and 7950 is available, that's really quite a lot of space to choose from. 7890 just seems such an obvious name to choose that I am amazed they haven't used it. I just can't see a single reason not to.That is what is so annoying and astonishing.
What I heard was that it was meant to a Christmas/New Year special short run card or something like that,which was up to companies to implement,ie,no reference design. However,what appears to have also been rumoured,was that OEMs were not keen on it since,it was too close to an HD7950 and were scared HD7950 and HD7870 sales would be affected.
It seems so far only Powercolor is the only company making one,as the VTX and Club3D ones are the same card.
Agreed, I was expecting either 7890 and 7950. Maybe they couldn't agree so someone came up with the great idea of using an existing name? :facepalm:
Just noticed how many GT 640 there are, GF116 and GK107 and various memory flavours, all just called a 640. Similar story for 630/620. The OEM/retail difference is especially annoying.
I mean I guess a lot of the issues are around poor yields on more complicated designs. AMD and Nvidia are coming up with products not because they planned to, but because they have bunch of otherwise unusable chips. Because of this unplanned nature it messes up what was originally (we hope!) a sensible naming structure.
AFAIK,we should be getting the HD8000 series in three months time,so is AMD trying to get rid of as many defective Tahiti chips??
Surely they'd want to get rid of them regardless. I mean presumably they are unsuitable for use in real 7950s.
Like I mentioned,it was rumoured OEMs were not too happy to make a HD7870 Special Edition,as sales of other SKUs would be affected. I think it was a TPU article.
At least it means they won't rebrand theam as 8755.7's? Hopefully...
I'm still wondering if/when we'll see unused GK110 dies in a consumer card, according to the likes of CD they should have a ton of them - even on Tesla they're not fully enabled to improve yield. I was expecting to see them before now, but I've been thinking, the die size will be roughly double GK104 so would be massively more expensive to make, so that puts raw cost above the 690. So, considering yields, they'd probably have to keep clocks relatively low and combined with the extra disabled cores, performance would be around 690 (assuming everything besides shaders also scales linearly), just without the problems associated with multi-GPU. Based purely on that, we could be looking at a more expensive card which performs worse in games which scale well with SLI. OTOH, Nvidia might be happy to shift them with very low/negative margins to recuperate some of the cost of making them.
Seems silly to me, they are as likely to upsell from a 7870 to a 7890 as they are to downsell from a 7950 surely? Assuming that pricing matches performance which it ought to, at least on the AMD side of things.
I mean AMD are under the same pressures as their partners surely. AMD have the same interest in keeping 7950 sales high as their partners do.
Considering the SKU was meant to be HD7870 price,I would imagine HD7870 prices would have to be depressed. I suspect HD7870 sales are good enough for OEMs not wanting to do this,especially if the HD7870SE is a short term product. It also appears close enough to an HD7950 too,so it could mean lower sales.
Sucks for the consumer though.
So I guess this implies that AMD are sitting on quite a large a pile of sub-standard Tahiti chips that they can't afford to ditch. I wonder in that case why they didn't try to use up these chips earlier in the 7 series lifecycle.
I also wonder whether Nvidia planned to use GK104 in so many different SKUs or whether this was an unplanned response to poor yields.
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