AMD should just do a special edition Tahiti on a 550mm2 die 28nm and crush everything!

Not worth the R&D investment. Such a card would be too expensive to manufacture and design which would mean a very high price. $700+ cards have very limited target market. I think that money and engineering resources are better spent over the next 12 months improving HD7000 drivers, launching HD8000M parts more aggressively and working on 20nm generation against Maxwell.

waiting is smarter…

and competitor does not have to be single card…. a 690 competes with the Titan, it just had some flaws.

also: if AMD/Nvidia release their next gen cards right now than those would probably be around for 1.5-2+ years.
why? because Apple will probably move to TSMC for 20nm (getting rid of samsung in supply chain due to disputes) and that could mean 20nm might not be available for Nvidia/AMD until 6-9+ months after the process comes online.

Waiting makes both biz sense, and should sate consumers better over the long term.

PS. 8000 series are supposed to be 15-30 percent faster, so, close to titan, yes, beating it, no.

As for the 7970 GHz Edition, what they said is that the card ‘will continue to live until the end of 2013′, meaning they will still produce it. It does not say it will remain as the flagship model. By not releasing a card that could compete with the Titan performance this year, AMD is shooting at their own foot. It took Titan 3 weeks from the first rumors to appear on the geforce website, mostly because they already had the GPU ready. AMD surely has an ace up its sleeve, but it’s still in development stage, actually it’s only my hope.
As for the ARES 2 TDP, it was Keith who added that, I didn’t check the numbers :)

As for the ARES 2 TDP, it was Keith who added that, I didn’t check the numbers

Well, he made a mistake.

http://i.imgur.com/0BawDh9.jpg

You know, a writer is supposed to check the article before publishing it; just saying.

Read the interview more carefully from techpowerup. They confirm it’s the fastest single GPU for all of 2013. AMD has nothing to replace it.

[journalist C]: Hi, just to confirm, what you said means that Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition stays AMD’s fastest single-GPU graphics card until the end of the year?”

Devon: “Yes.”

AMD is not releasing the real HD8970 until 2014. We don’t know if it will be on 28nm or 20nm. Even if they release a refresh 28nm part, surely 6-7 months later 20nm GPUs have to follow by second half of 2014. AMD has already stated they have no interest in releasing a single-GPU card to compete against the Titan and it should have been expected since AMD never made large die GPUs with 500mm2 die area and HD7970Ghz’s power consumption. They also do not have a strong business like Tesla. It makes no sense for them to spend money competing with the Titan. Other than marketing the world’s fastest card, the rest of their desktop line-up is very competitive. They’ll release a dual-GPU HD7990 and that’s it. Shooting yourself in the foot would be IF AMD wasted millions of dollars trying to compete with the Titan when the real battle will ensure at 20nm against Maxwell. $500-600 Maxwell chips shold be as fast or faster than the Titan on 20nm. AMD needs to worry about that not the Titan ;)

I don’t know about never. Both SLI and CF have improved over the years. Why would the improvements stop? The Titan did the opposite for NV. It made the HD7970Ghz look even better than before. AMD doesn’t need to compete with it since it’s so ridiculously overpriced. The Titan at max overclock is less than 40% faster than a stock HD7970Ghz. Overclock the 7970 too and the Titan won’t be faster by more than 25-30%. The price premium to get there is 130-160% over the the average price of 7970s. The Titan doesn’t come with any AAA games either.
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/2013/test-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan/7/

Techpowerup’s review: “I somehow feel the $1000 price-tag might hurt the brand more than help it. People could despise NVIDIA for pricing the card so prohibitively with such an obnoxiously high price, even if those same people would still not buy the card at, say, $700. Sure, the statement “NVIDIA has the fastest single GPU” holds true, but “NVIDIA has the most overpriced single-GPU card in 25 years of VGA history” is also equally true.”

No one is going to be cross-shopping HD7970s against the Titan anyway. Most sane people are going to wait until $500 GPUs on 20nm bring that level of performance instead of spending $1-2K to play PS360 console ports on the PC this year. For 1920×1200, GTX670/680/HD7959/7970 are fast enough while for some demanding games like Crysis 3, the Titan is nowhere near fast enough. It can’t even hit 50 fps in Crysis 3 at 1920×1080 with MSAA:

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/2013/test-nvidia-geforce-gtx-titan/17/

Very small number of premium PC buyers and the most hardcore PC gamers will care. Even existing GTX680 SLI , GTX690 or HD7970 cross-fire owners are unlikely to upgrade to the Titan since they would have to buy two such videocards to feel a real difference. NV pricing this card at $1000 did more to piss off its loyal PC enthusiasts who would have paid $700-800 but at $1000, it’s a pure niche product aimed at the wealthy, PC boutiques and people who haven’t already upgraded to dual-GPUs last year.

If I was going to follow every single interview with AMD employees I wouldn’t have time to write posts :) I have never said anything about a single-gpu, 500+ mm2 die, competitor for Titan. This very post was about Malta, probably a dual-gpu card, which everyone is expecting to be something like 7990. Maybe this is not a counterpart for the Titan, but it would surely stimulate the high-end segment. As for the new cards on updated technology, I don’t believe they will wait till 2014 for the new series. To be precise, I’m not talking about 8970 itself, but the whole series. They may start with the mid-range segment though (which is highly unlikely), that’s because they will have GPUs like Bonaire ready. Nevertheless, I do hope they will start with the new series this year, because I really want a material to write about :)

Could someone explain why AMD’d release a 7790 if that would offer, according to the article: ‘performance close to the HD 7870′ It would completely ruin 7850 sales?

was just putting our what were i thought that 600W could have come from…

and i totally use 360 Watts of power on my 480 when i am playing Crysis 1,2,3 and warhead at the same time XD :)

It was included to show the insane power draw of current 7990 designs vs. Titan, I said 550W+ which is correct… I’m sorry I linked the wrong picture, here you go (551W): http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_7990_Devil_13/25.html

In comparison, Titan barely pulls more than the 7970GE: http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6774/53407.png What I wrote was correct, it was simply the wrong picture.

HardOCP shows during Boost/Overclock the Ares II pulling 896W for total system power usage (during gaming, not stress testing), that is insane for a single card: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/01/28/asus_rog_ares_ii_video_card_review/10#.USuYc1dIPxQ

No mistake except for the embedded link.

YAWNNN!!

Sure. I’ll explain.

The goal is to have a card to be in-between 7850 and 650ti at stock so AMD can compete with 650ti without hacking 7800 prices to zero margin for no good reason. There is roughly 20% performance between those cards. That is quite obviously part of the reason on-the-whole to keep the 7000 name around and slot these new chips into the existing line-up. The supplements prop up the existing structure rather than replace it.

The reason for this card’s existence is almost certainly because 7790 would be cheaper to produce than 7850. Let’s say such a card is either 768/896sp and 128 or 192-bit. It would be somewhere around 130+-<170mm2 compared to Pitcairn's 212mm (or probably around 180-something mm of that used on 7850).

Just for simple maths, if 768sp/128-bit (the most cost-efficient scenario), it would need to be ~1075-1100mhz/6000 to beat 650ti…which is possible but a stretch. It also doesn't mesh with 'no overclocking' because that would be clocked plenty high.

A more likely scenario is the chip (if not also this part) is 896sp, which is perfectly matched for 16 ROPs, and very similar over-all to 650ti (but native rather than salvage). In that scenario it could be clocked similar (925/5400) if 128-bit to achieve similar performance. Being likely that AMD will want to split the difference (say 10% faster), you can start figuring it out. Just remember, if CI is like SI, on a 128-bit bus using 6ghz ram, it would not be clocked higher than 950mhz. Hence the possibility of 192-bit and higher engine clocks (which would go into 7850 territory) now if not on a later revision of the part.

As for Malta, I will assume that is a 1792sp/256-bit ('8800') crossfire-on-a-stick until it's proven otherwise. That would compete well-enough with Titan/690. Yeah…conceivably frame times and stutter…but yeah, also probably not $1000. IOW, a return to when AMD fought the big nvidia chip with an 2x <300mm2 chip config.