Video Cards & GPUs - Page 406

Our first tid bit of news on AMD's next generation of GPUs, the HD 7000 series has come out today with word that these will be the first PCI-Express 3.0 compliant graphics cards to hit the scene.

Using the PCI-E 3.0 x16 bus interface, they will of course be backwards compatible with the PCI-E 1.0 and 2.0/1 bus standard. It it not known at this time as to when AMD plans to launch this next generation of discrete graphics cards, so it's hard to speculate as to whether or not there will be any native PCI-E 3.0 support from AMD or Intel at the time, but as we just learned recently, there are some 3rd party vendors already gearing up with PCI-E 3.0 using their own methods.

Still, as we've known from many times in the past, there is a big difference between 'compliancy' and actually harnessing the additional power on tap. With that said, it is most probable the HD 7000 series (with perhaps the exception of some super duper dual GPU monster at the top of its line-up) won't even use beyond the limits of our current Gen 2 standard, but at least it helps pave the way for the inevitable future where masses of bandwidth will be required.

First spotted at Computex early last month, HIS has now released its new Radeon HD 6970 IceQ "Mix" graphics card which is unlike any other around at this time - reason being it is able to be paired with either AMD or NVIDIA DX11 cards on any current motherboard for superior performance. This comes thanks to LucidLogix technology built into the card (most probably a physical Hydra chip residing on its PCB).

As you can see from the image, the card boasts a nice aftermarket dual-slot cooling solution with copper heat-pipes and a 'black hole impeller' fan) which is said to help drop temperatures by 23c over the reference AMD cooler while also being somewhat quieter.

The card supports Eyefinity 5 via its many outputs including dual-DVI, HDMI 1.2 and dual DisplayPort 1.2. The factory clocks on the card see the GPU running at 880MHz out of the box with its 2GB of GDDR5 memory at 5500MHz QDR.

Charlie from SemiAccurate has written an article on Kepler which is NVIDIA's upcoming 28nm-based flagship GPU. If one were to believe the article, it would look like AMD is going to beat NVIDIA to the holy grail of 28nm-based GPUs. Charlie reckons that AMD taped out Southern Islands in February whilst NVIDIA didn't tape out Kepler until June.

He then estimates that a delay of around seven to eight months between tape out and launch, which should throw AMD's cards into our hands in around two months whilst NVIDIA's cards won't get their green on until February of next year "at the earliest." Another thing to throw into the ring of speculation is Kepler's processing resources. Charlie wrote a separate piece that Southern Islands is more or less a play-it-safe shrink of the Cayman-based design that powers the Radeon HD 6900 series whilst Kepler is a new architecture that has substantially more processing resources than Fermi.

If this is true, we might see a repeat of the entire Radeon HD 5000 series punching the Fermi-based GeForce 400-series in the nuts, Cartman style.