hey, don't you drail the amd bashing train! it was going so nicely!:awe::sneaky:
We now even have market share data as if it has anything to do with technical specs or performance of R9 300 series. Anything that supports the promotes the idea that AMD is soon finished, will never produce good desktop or laptop graphics, let's just throw it in!
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Some info on Carrizo shows that AMD has the capability to improve on the 28nm design in terms of transistor density, power consumption and die area.
"The die is still based on a 28nm node yet AMD has managed to optimize the overall chip design by adding 29% more transistors than Kaveri thanks to the high-density design library. This results in a 3.1 Billion transistor die that delivers 40% lesser power consumption and 23% lesser die area than its predecessor. The H.265 encode support allows 3.5 times transcode performance of Kaveri while the compute architecture enables the 8 GCN compute units (512 stream processors) a reduction of 20% in power consumption.
On the graphics front, AMD achieves 18% leakage reduction and gate-timing with faster RVT devices that enables 10% higher frequency while consuming sipping the same level of power.
While it is true that we cannot compare the Carrizo SOC to a large die GPU, the point still stands that AMD has figured out a way to improve perf/watt, reduce leakage, reduce power usage and die area on the same 28nm node.
Based on that I am not going to believe the doom and gloom scenario being thrown around by the pessimists in this thread that AMD will only have 2 new chips, everything else just rebadges as this would mean no new design wins for laptops in the next 1.5 years if Tonga is the best AMD has for laptops.
Also, as I said but it has not been addressed directly:
1) If you just rebadge 285/290/290X and lower prices, a price reduced 970 would neutralize all of those.
2) If they were going to re-badge 90% of everything for laptops and desktops, why did they wait 1.5 years to do that? AMD could have easily launched rebadged R9 370/370X/380/380X starting January 1, 2015. New year, OEMs love new product numbers. AMD didn't do this though which means it's way more likely that they are making improvements to their existing designs.
While it is true that AMD doesn't have the financial resources to introduce from the ground-up architectures like Fermi -> Kepler -> Maxwell -> Volta, they keep improving on GCN which itself is still a good architecture. AMD needs to be able to take Hawaii and make an Enhanced Hawaii chip.
My opinion is AMD no longer has the resources to bring out a complete line of new GPUs. That's why I think we will see two new SKUs and the rest re-badges.
AMD designed a brand new Tonga chip, only used in R9 285 (desktop) and the Apple iMacs. Why would AMD introduce such dramatic improvements in Tonga in terms of colour & memory bandwidth compression, tessellation, pixel fill-rate efficiency and then do absolutely nothing with those architectural improvements for R9 370/380 series?
I mean how do you honestly expect a 260-270W R9 380/380X (straight up 290/290X re-badges) to sell along-side a $250 GTX970? The negative perception regarding the heat, noise levels and poor perf/watt of reference R9 290 cards left such a bad taste in the minds of the average PC gamers, that even if AMD started selling R9 290X as 380X with 0 changes at $199, it would still be outsold by 960/970 cards. If AMD goes re-badge route for everything but > $400 Fiji chips, they will go down to 10-15% desktop market share and pretty much 0% in laptops. For AMD to get some laptop design wins, it's a MUST to have improved perf/watt chips. You can't fit a 300W Fiji Pro / XT chip inside a laptop so you propose that AMD's strategy in laptops for the next 1.5 years until 14nm is do nothing but continue selling 3-year-old 7970M and a cut-down Tonga 285? Seriously?