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Back to the NI family, what are they? Well, that part is easy enough, they are a serious re-do of the Evergreen family. The biggest change is in the shaders, they have gone from a 4 simple + 1 complex arrangement to a 4 medium complexity arrangement. This should end up no slower than the old way for simple calculations, the overwhelming majority of the workload, but also be faster for most of the complex operations.
The reason for this can be summed up by saying that the new 'medium' shaders can't do what a complex one can in the same time, but there are more of them, and they can more than make it up in number. Since a GPU is a throughput machine, not a latency bound device, you won't see the difference, it will just work a lot faster in several kinds of operations.
There will probably be a pathological case or two that will be a bit slower, so look for the attack slide decks to float as soon as samples leak. Remember the Nvidia slides from CES about how Fermi was many times faster than HD5870 on a specific section of the Heaven benchmark? Remember how well that turned out in practice, and in sales? Wait for real benchmarks, and don't worry about the desperate sputters from the big green FUD cannon.
Since the shader count is 80% of the old grouping, there is some space saved, and on top of that AMD has had a lot of time to optimize area. On the down side, each shader is marginally bigger, but the end result is a cluster of four new shaders that is smaller than the old 4+1 group, and faster too.
The uncore, or at least unshader is beefed up as well, with some very notable efficiency gains as well. The net result should be vastly better utilized shaders as well, so performance should go up incrementally there too. Throw in a few more shader groups, and you have a notable speed increase from the NI family.
The down side is size. More shaders, smaller though they may be, and a beefier front ends adds up to a larger die. If this part was on 32nm, it would be smaller and probably would have had more shaders as well, but the backport had a price. The net result is that the die of NI will grow by about 10-15%, lets call it around 380-400mm^2. Performance on the other had should grow disproportionately, with the few weak spots of the Evergreen architecture smoothed over. That is what the game is about, isn't it?
When is the HD6000 series launching? There have been rumors of October 12th flying around, but that is not the launch date. On October 12th, there is an event related to the 6000 series, but there won't be cards on sale until October 25 +/- a day or two depending on schedules.
The reason for this can be summed up by saying that the new 'medium' shaders can't do what a complex one can in the same time, but there are more of them, and they can more than make it up in number. Since a GPU is a throughput machine, not a latency bound device, you won't see the difference, it will just work a lot faster in several kinds of operations.
There will probably be a pathological case or two that will be a bit slower, so look for the attack slide decks to float as soon as samples leak. Remember the Nvidia slides from CES about how Fermi was many times faster than HD5870 on a specific section of the Heaven benchmark? Remember how well that turned out in practice, and in sales? Wait for real benchmarks, and don't worry about the desperate sputters from the big green FUD cannon.
Since the shader count is 80% of the old grouping, there is some space saved, and on top of that AMD has had a lot of time to optimize area. On the down side, each shader is marginally bigger, but the end result is a cluster of four new shaders that is smaller than the old 4+1 group, and faster too.
The uncore, or at least unshader is beefed up as well, with some very notable efficiency gains as well. The net result should be vastly better utilized shaders as well, so performance should go up incrementally there too. Throw in a few more shader groups, and you have a notable speed increase from the NI family.
The down side is size. More shaders, smaller though they may be, and a beefier front ends adds up to a larger die. If this part was on 32nm, it would be smaller and probably would have had more shaders as well, but the backport had a price. The net result is that the die of NI will grow by about 10-15%, lets call it around 380-400mm^2. Performance on the other had should grow disproportionately, with the few weak spots of the Evergreen architecture smoothed over. That is what the game is about, isn't it?
When is the HD6000 series launching? There have been rumors of October 12th flying around, but that is not the launch date. On October 12th, there is an event related to the 6000 series, but there won't be cards on sale until October 25 +/- a day or two depending on schedules.
Source: SemiAccurate :: What is AMD's Northern Islands?, Radeon HD 6000 series is Northern Island(NI) not Southern Island(SI)
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