News - AMD roadmap hints at five upcoming Radeon HD 7000-series GPUs

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HD 7990, HD 7870, HD 7850, HD 7770 and HD 7750 all scheduled to land in the first half of 2012.

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So according to that my 6870 would be replaced with a 7870 which works fine for me, I'm not due an upgrade until the 8870 hits eitherway :D

i thought that the models below 79xx would be using an older VLIW based instruction processor. Good if it doesnt mind!

They have to be kidding with that pricing structure ... 7870 priced at £250, yet there own chart puts it below the outgoing £200 6950.
You can even pick up a 6970 for £250!

I think we're all a bit disappointed with the new price structure...but things are getting more expensive all around

Hmmm, I have two old 4850s in crossfilre which I am looking to replace. I recall that a 5850 was approximately equivalent to two 4850s in crossfire and that a 6870 was more or less equivalent to the 5850 etc etc but I am having problems translating this on to the GCN architecture.

Does anyone have an ideas as to how the number of GNC "processors" compares with the old VLIW shader processors? Are they doing he same job or more or less?

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Originally Posted by keithwalton

They have to be kidding with that pricing structure ... 7870 priced at £250, yet there own chart puts it below the outgoing £200 6950.
You can even pick up a 6970 for £250!

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AMD are trying to reap the benefits of being first to market. I would expect that the pricing will become more sensible when Nvidia bring out their Kepler GPUs.

there have been rumours that the midrange Pitcairn would be VLIW4, and even that the low-end would be VLIW5................?

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Originally Posted by tonpal

AMD are trying to reap the benefits of being first to market. I would expect that the pricing will become more sensible when Nvidia bring out their Kepler GPUs.

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Exactly. The pricing of the 7950 against the 580 suggests that AMD are wanting to keep the financial benefits of a smaller process for as long as they can. That might not be long though if Nvidia decide to undercut them in the next couple of months. It might be a big undercut from the Green Team to make a point and get lots of sales, or just enough to inch them ahead. While as a consumer I like it when the efficiencies from a process shrink result in nice big day 1 reductions in price or increases in bang for buck, I am always surprised when it does happen.

And in any event, don't forget these are Hexus's guestimates not official SRP's from AMD (I think!)

its an expensive jump in process thats why its so much more expensive, pricing will certainly drop but its a combination of AMD wanting to reap the rewards and it generally being a bit more expensive, R&D wasnt cheap!. AMD deserve reaping the profits at the minute, they beat Nvidia to the market and their gpus are performing brilliantly and onpar price vs performance on previous gen so if you cant wait you arent in a too bad position thankfully :).

It will drop as soon as kepler is released :).

So is there going to be a sizeable gulf between the 79xx and 78xx given there is no 6950 equivalent?

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Originally Posted by keithwalton

They have to be kidding with that pricing structure ... 7870 priced at £250, yet there own chart puts it below the outgoing £200 6950.
You can even pick up a 6970 for £250!

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I'm not sure that chart makes any sense in a performance perspective. For example the 7950 is clearly faster than the 6970 yet comes well below it in the chart.

The expectation is that the 7870 will match the 6970.

The chart depicts market segment. Not price, not performance. It's related to both of those, but prices and performances can jump segments or move within segments. 7950 is clearly not slower or cheaper than a 6970, but it is below it in market segment - the 6970 was the previous top GPU from AMD, the 7950 is not designed to be the top GPU.

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Originally Posted by MilesPebody

Does anyone have an ideas as to how the number of GNC "processors" compares with the old VLIW shader processors? Are they doing he same job or more or less?

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Hmm, let's see: 6970 had slightly less VLIW4 shaders than 5870 had VLIW5, has a slightly higher base clock, and was 15% - 20% faster on launch (going by the hexus review).

7970 vs 6970, it has 33% more shaders, again clocked slightly higher, and depending on game gives an improvement of anywhere from 15% to 70+% (again according to hexus' review ;) ). The 70% was Crysis 2 though (special case wrt tesselation), and a 40%-50% improvement seems to be fairly standard except in some notable cases. On that basis, the shaders are probably slightly - but not massively, more efficient than the VLIW4 architecture, which itself was probably 15% faster shader for shader / clock for clock than VLIW5.

I think what we'll see is the 7870 / 7850 performing very similarly to the 6970/6950, in that 1400 - 1600 shader region, and the 7770 / 7750 - if they are in the 800+ shader area - performing up around the 6870 / 6850 level (depending on clock speeds, obviously)

hopefully the lower end cards (7750 area) will be so efficient that they can be passive and even possibly low profile?

No mention of the rumoured Tahiti LE based cards. They looked very interesting but if the slides have the correct pricing they and any 1.5Gb HD7950 cards would have to fit into the £250-£350 bracket.

Looks like two 7850's could really kick some butt.

On further thinking it looks like they are undoing the naming mistake of the 6000 series.

As usually the high end of on series would become the mainstream of the next series.
Roughly speaking the 5770 was on par with the 4870 (core was the same, memory bandwidth was less)
They messed up the 6000 series when the 6870 was significantly slower than the 5870 at best it should of been called the 6770.

With this series it looks like the 7870 will be on par with the old 6970 (less cores but more clockspeed) it's just a shame they've given the new mainstream part the old high end price.

They should really reserve the *9** range for dual gpu's. *8** for high end, and *7** for mainstream.

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Originally Posted by keithwalton

On further thinking it looks like they are undoing the naming mistake of the 6000 series.

As usually the high end of on series would become the mainstream of the next series.
Roughly speaking the 5770 was on par with the 4870 (core was the same, memory bandwidth was less)
They messed up the 6000 series when the 6870 was significantly slower than the 5870 at best it should of been called the 6770.

With this series it looks like the 7870 will be on par with the old 6970 (less cores but more clockspeed) it's just a shame they've given the new mainstream part the old high end price.

They should really reserve the *9** range for dual gpu's. *8** for high end, and *7** for mainstream.

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They messed the 6xxx series up when the 6770 was really a 5770 with a new sticker.

Whats the reckoning on low power, but modern card in the £60-£80. When things start at £115 it seems a little high and rather exclusive. A 6570 replacement with the lower power draw and quiet cooling would be nice.

well i hope those guestimates are well off, i've been holding off replacing my HD4870 with a HD6870 which you can now get for under £130 for the possibility of the new HD7870 but not at £250

Where the hell is NVidia answer? Not a single article about them waking the hell up. Disappointed.. They would better come up with smt decent or else! :)

Can anyone give an estimate as to when the HD 7870 will be released? I read somewhere that it will be released on the 6th of March whereas other sources are saying the 16th of March. Any insight on this matter would be appreciated.

i just wish they'd stop messing around and just release the info about the new cards regardless of launch dates so you can make informed decisions on whether to wait n get the new one or get the current one.