AMD Radeon 6000 'Barts' specs

I hope you're wrong on the timing of when these will show up in Macs.

It would be nice to see these start showing up in Sandy Bridge Macs, assuming Apple stick with Intel..but who knows, starting next year.

I won't hold my breath, though.

I expect he said 10 months because of Apple's approximately annual refresh cycle.

It is good that they are hitting on all cylinders right now.

Don't be so sure about Apple, reports are that drivers are already being updated for the Mac.

Sometimes I think Apple is becoming more aggressive with their hardware and other times I think the lay back and enjoy the current brisk sales. If they brought the same enthusiasm to their desktop line that they seem to exhibit in their laptop line we could see these in Macs soon

The last issue is the one that stood out for me the most. This is the idea that a midrange graphics card these days is an 150 watt + device. This is pretty much out of place when the rest of the platform might be running on 75 watts to 150 watts. Is it reasonable to call it midrange when the GPU card may be sucking up more that 50% of the power used by the system?

Hopefully AMD is looking at this power usage issue and can make significant strides when moving to the 28nm process. It looks like they have made great strides on the CPU/Integrated GPU side of things so maybe they can filter some of this tech down for use in GPU cards. On the other hand they do far better than NVIdia so maybe they are on the right track. I just don't know for how long high energy usage cards like this will be accepted for midrange GPU performance.





Dave

One thing to note is that the idle power consumption of modern high-end graphics cards is insignificant. They only use lots of power when you're loading the GPU.

Awesome. The biggest criticism of Juniper was the crippled memory bus that really hampered performance when compared to the 5800 series.

Going back to 256bit should bring things close to the excellent 5850 standard.

Hope the benches are good, desperately need something below $200 that can do close to 5850-level graphics. The 5850 has been sitting on $300 or so for at least a year because of lack of competition from Nvidia while they sorted out their Fermi troubles...!

Well, AMD has been the one leading the way when they came out with the 5000 series. They are arguably the best performance-per-watt cards for mainstream to enthusiast gaming GPUs. Nvidia only just came to the party with their 460. The AMD 5850 for example, had some unheard-of low power and heat compared to how well it performed.

It is still a challenge, for any mainstream to enthusiast gaming GPU we're looking at the GPU alone taking up half the power draw at load, sometimes twice as much.

AMD is on the right track, it is more up to TSMC to deliver 28nm and then we'll see some nice performance-per-watt.

I just wish OpenCL was more widely implemented, right now everything is still so CPU-dependent and Intel CPUs pack a real punch. Powerful GPUs are still marginalised to gaming PCs, which are competing with console gaming, where I think consoles are winning in terms of overall ease-of-use and number of titles available.

Fusion will be interesting.


Well, the thing is, "midrange" is the entry-level for any kind of decent gaming performance on a PC. We're talking up to DX10 or DX11 at 1920x1080p (since these monitors are so commonplace). So the AMD 5700 series is what is considered "midrange", maybe the 5600 but less so.

Anything 5500 or lower, or integrated, just won't cut it for modern 3D gaming unless you turn the settings way down.

High energy usage cards may not be accepted for much longer, since there is such a big shift to laptops and people might usually just get a console and be able to play all of the latest titles than struggle with upgrading a big hot desktop box all the time.

I stopped playing PC games for about 6 months now (had a AMD dualcore CPU and ATI 4830 512MB) because I was increasingly frustrated with the cost of PC game titles, and lack of titles such as God of War and possibly the latest Need For Speed (Hot Pursuit or something(?)). I was also pissed off by the DX10 scam, most games to date are still DX9 and DX10 really kills frame rates. DX11 is supposed to be better because it actually speeds up some processes (eg. hardware tessellation), but DX11 titles will probably be loaded with so much other eye candy you'll need beyond mainstream GPUs.

This is kinda my point. NVidia lost sight of other important factors one of which is power usage. At least for the many of us that won't be buying a high end card anytime soon.

Of course winter is coming so maybe a little space heating is in order.

That is not a problem for gaming but if you look at midrange GPUs as mainstream graphics processors it is a different story. Many of us need respectable cost effective 3D support.

I'd like to see AMD make the chips themselves, instead of going with external suppliers. Rumors are that their new process is very nice.

GPU processing will only every benefit certain classes of problems. It is the nature of their SIMD design. AMD has some interesting ideas here for future Fusion processors but the GPU resouces will never become place for general purpose code.

Beyound that OpenCL is catching on and is being used where it makes sense. I think the problem is that OpenCL has never been marketed well to the public. It is a fine technology but it is not a mirical.

Your perspective seems to be gaming oriented. The problem is in a discussion about Macs the issues have always been driver related. It looks like Aple is slowly correcting that.

Yes it will be, I'm hoping AMD can win some design ins with Apple. Even here expectations are out of control with comparisons to chips the Bobcat based chips whereno designed to compete with.

See here is the problem I think of Midrange as the middle of the cost spread for GPU cards no matter what they are used for. So if I'm running a CAD program at home or on a laptop I expect reasonable performance. No it won't be CAD like performance that one gets from a dedicated card, but none the less servicable.

I'm not a console person at all, to many limitations and to high of a cost.

As to desktops I actually think we might see a shift back to them as the current trend of trying to stuff a desktop machine into a laptop is a bit boneheaded if you ask me. IPad is an enabler here and is an ideal companion to a desktop machine. Especially with remote access software.

Good to hear. Try something physical to keep yourself in shape.

As a side note you can get games, very creative games, on the iPad dirt cheap. There is something to be said for making it difficult to steal software as the developers are doing very well without charging a lot.

After thinking about it a bit, expense is likely one big reason I never got into gaming big time. It is a bit like an electronic drug for many. Yes an addiction that drains wallets just as well as crack.

Yeah, what's the state of Global Foundries? Are they making GPUs or just CPUs? How is their 28nm process?

Good news looks like these cards will be showing up for macs pretty soon.

http://www.electronista.com/articles...ng.october.22/

AMD has done a pretty good job with advancing Radeon technology. the 6000 series is no exception and it looks great on paper.