

AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & 6950 Debut: Enter Cayman - MojoKid
http://hothardware.com/Reviews/AMD-Radeon-HD-6970--6950-GPU-Reviews-Enter-Cayman/

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frisco
_Hold on, hold on a second._ Let's put this in perspective. This _brand new_
ATI flagship card has a whopping 24 cores clocked at 880 MHz and a memory bus
capable of 5.5 GB/sec. There's no general purpose API here; everything is
shaders. Let's compare this to the latest NVIDIA desktop GPU, the GTX 580,
capable of both shaders (graphics-native code) and general purpose
programming: _512 cores clocked at 1.5 GHz with 192 GB/sec in memory
throughput_. What? And this isn't even NVIDIA's most powerful card. How does
ATI get out of bed in the morning?

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sparky
There is a rational debate to be had about the relative merits of the two
architectures and programming ecosystems; this isn't it.

1) A GPU "core" is loosely defined. Those "512 CUDA cores" are 16 streaming
multiprocessors with 32-wide SIMT.

2) Big parts of GF100/110's SMs are double-clocked; most of the rest of the
chip runs at 750MHz (for the clock rates in your example).

3) 5.5 Gigabits per second per data pin (faster than GF100/110). 256 data pins
(fewer). 176 Gigabytes per second per chip (close).

4) OpenCL. There are and have been others, but OpenCL is probably ATI's bet
for general purpose programming. You could say it's inferior to CUDA (and I'd
agree), but to act like it doesn't exist cheapens the debate.

This does speak to the immense power of marketing though; it's easy to lay
down such a thicket of buzzwords that you can spin a product any way you want.

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MojoKid
Exactly, it's all how the two companies market their architecture is all, that
and branding. Technically speaking, AMD does more in less silicon area but
also has to run at higher clock speeds to do so. The power draw is about
comparable between similar price/performance ratios from each camp.

