AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs
by Ryan Smith on September 23, 2009 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
A Quick Refresher on the RV770
As Cypress is a direct evolution of the RV770 design, before we talk about what’s new with Cypress we are going to go over a quick rehash of RV770’s internal workings. As it’s necessary to understand how RV770 was built to understand what Cypress changes, if you’re completely unfamiliar with RV770, please take a look at our expanded discussion of RV770 from last year. For the rest of you, let’s get started.
At the center of the RV770 is the Stream Processing Unit (SPU), a single arithmetic logic unit. The RV770 has 800 of these, and they are packaged together in groups of 5 and are what we call a Streaming Processor (SP). A SP contains a register file, a branch predictor, and the aforementioned 5 SPUs, with the 5th SPU being a more complex unit capable of transcendental functions along with the base functions of an ALU. The SP is the smallest unit that can do individual work; every SPU in an SP must execute the same instruction.
For every 16 SPs, AMD groups them together with texture units, L1 cache, shared memory, and controlling logic. This combined block is what AMD calls a SIMD, and RV770 has 10 of them. These 10 SIMDs form the core computational power of the RV770, and in the chip work with various specialized units such as ROPs, rasterizers, L2 cache, and tesselators to form a complete chip.
To utilize the computational power of the hardware, instruction threads are issued to the SPs. These threads are grouped into wavefronts, where there are 64 threads per wavefront. To maximize the utilization of the GPU, threads need to be organized so that they can feed all 5 SPUs in a SP an instruction every clock cycle. Doing this requires extracting instruction level parallelism (ILP) out of programs being passed to the GPU, which is difficult task of AMD’s compiler.
If SPUs go unused, then the performance of the chip suffers due to underutilization. This design gives AMD a great deal of theoretical computational power, but it is always a challenge to fully exploit it.
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SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
No, it's the fact you tell LIES, and always in ati's favor, and you got caught, over and over again.That is WHAT HAS HAPPENED.
Now you catch hold of your senses for a moment, and supposedly all the crap you spewed is "ok".
SiliconDoc - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
Once again, all that matters to YOU, is YOUR games for PC, and ONLY top sellers, and only YOUR OPINION on PhysX.However, after you claimed only 2 games, you went on to bloviate about Havok.
Now you've avoided entirely that issue. Am I to assume, as you have apparently WISHED and thrown about, that HAVOK does not function on NVidia cards? NO QUITE THE CONTRARY !
--
What is REAL, is that NVidia runs Havok AND PhysX just fine, and not only that but ATI DOES NOT.
Now, instead of supporting BOTH, you have singled out your object of HATRED, and spewed your infantile rants, your put downs, your empty comparisons (mere statements), then DEMAND that I show PhysX is worthwhile, with "golden sellers". LOL
It has been 1.5 years or so since Aegia acquisition, and of course, game developers turning anything out in just 6 short months are considered miracle workers.
The real problem oif course for you is ATI does not support PhysX, and when a rouge coder made it happen, NVidia supported him, while ATI came in and crushed the poor fella.
So much for "competition", once again.
Now, I'd demand you show where HAVOK is worthwhile, EXCEPT I'm not the type of person that slams and reams and screams against " a percieved enemy company" just because "my favorite" isn't capable, and in that sense, my favorite IS CAPABLE.
Now, PhysX is awesome, it's great, it's the best there is, and that may or may not change, but as for now, NO OTHER demonstrations (you tube and otherwise) can match it.
That's just a sad fact for you, and with so many maintaining your biased and arrogant demand for anything else, we may have another case of VHS instead of BETA, which of course, you would heartily celebrate, no matter how long it takes to get there.
LOL
Yes, it is funny. It's just hilarious. A few months ago before Mirror's Edge and Anand falling in love with PhysX in it, admittedly, in the article he posted, we had the big screamers whining ZERO.
Well, now a few months later you are whining TWO.
Get ready to whine higher. Yes, you have read about the uptick in support ? LOL
You people are really something.
Oh, I know, CUDA is a big fat zero according to you, too.
(please pass along your thoughts to higher education universities here in the USA, and the federal government national lab research facilites. Thanks)
SiliconDoc - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
Yes, another excuse monger. So you basically admit the text is biased, and claim all readers should see the charts and go by those. LOLSo when the text is biased, as you admit, how is it that the rest, the very core of the review is not ? You won't explain that either.
Furthermore, the assumption that competition leads to something better in technology for videocards quicker, fails the basic test that in terms of technology, there is a limit to how fast it proceeds forward, since scientific breakthroughs must come, and often don't come, for instance, new energy technologies, still struggling after decades to make a breakthrough, with endless billions spent, and not much to show for it.
Same here with videocards, there is a LIMIT to the advancement speed, and competition won't be able to exceed that limit.
Furthermore, I NEVER said prices won't be driven down by competition, and you falsely asserted that notion to me.
I DID however say, ATI ALSO IS KNOWN FOR OVERPRICING. (or rather unknown by the red fans, huh, even said by omission to have NOT COMMITTED that "huge sin", that you all blame only Nvidia for doing.)
So you're just WRONG once again.
Begging the other guy to "not argue" then mischaracterizing a conclusion from just one of my statements, ignoring the points made that prove your buddy wrong period, and getting the body of your idea concerning COMPETITION incorrect due to technological and scientific constraints you fail to include, is no way to "argue" at all.
I sure wish there was someone who could take on my points, but so far none of you can. Every time you try, more errors in your thinking are easily exposed.
A MONOPOLY, in let's take for instance, the old OIL BARRONS, was not stagnant, and included major advances in search and extraction, as Standard Oil history clearly testifies to.
Once again, the "pat" cleche' is good for some things ( for instance competing drug stores, for example ), or other such things that don't involve inaccesible technology that has not been INVENTED yet.
The fact that your simpleton attitude failed to note such anomolies, is clearly evidence that once again, thinking "is not reuired" for people like you.
Once again, the rebuttal has failed.
kondor999 - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
This is just sad, and I'm no fanboy. I really wanted a 5870, but only with 100% more speed than a GTX285 - not a lousy 33%. Definitely not worth me upgrading, so I guess ATI saved me some money. I'm certain that my 3 GTX280's in Tri-SLI will destroy 2 5870's in CF - although with slightly less compatability (an important advantage for ATI, but not nearly enough).Moricon - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
I have been a regular at Tomshardware for a while now, nad keep coming back to Anandtech time and again to read reviews I have already read on other sites, and this one is by far the best I have read so far, (guru3d, toms, firing squad, and many others)The 5870 looks awesome, but from an upgrade point of view, I guess my system will not really benefit from moving on from E7200 @3.8ghz 4gb 1066, HD4870 @850mhz 4400mhz on 1680x1050.
Such a shame that i dont have a larger monitor at the moment or I would have jumped immediately.
Looks like the path is q9550 and 5870 and 1920x1200 monitor or larger to make sense, then might as well go i7, i5, where do you stop..
Well done ATI, well done! But if history follows the Nvidia 3xx chip will be mindblowing compared!
djc208 - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
I was most surprised at how far behind the now 2-generation old 3870 is now (at least on these high-end games). Guess my next upgrade (after a SSD) should be a 5850 once the frenzy dies away.JonnyDough - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
They could probably use a 1.5 GB card. :(mapesdhs - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Ryan, any chance you could run Viewperf or other pro-app benchmarks
please? Some professionals use consumer hardware as a cheap way of
obtaining reasonable performance in apps like Maya, 3DS Max, ProE,
etc., so it would most interesting to know how the 5870 behaves when
running such tests, how it compares to Quadro and FireGL cards.
Pro-series boards normally have better performance for ops such as
antialiases lines via different drivers and/or different internal
firmware optimisations. Someday I figure perhaps a consumer card will
be able to match a pro card purely by accident.
Ian.
AmdInside - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Sorry if this has already been asked but does the 5870 support audio over Display Port? I am holding out for a card that does such a thing. I know it does it for HDMI but also want it to do it for Display Port.VooDooAddict - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Been waiting for a single gaming class card that can power more then 2 displays for quite some time. (The more then 2 monitors not necessarily for gaming.)The fact that this performs a noticeable bit better then my existing 4870 512MB is a bonus.