AMD Radeon HD 7750 & Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition Review: Evading The Price/Performance Curve
by Ryan Smith & Ganesh T S on February 15, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- HTPC
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
With the launch of Tahiti behind them, AMD is now firing on all cylinders to get the rest of their Southern Islands lineup out the door. Typically we’d see AMD launch their GPUs in descending order of performance, but this time AMD is taking a slight detour. Rather than following up the Tahiti based 7900 series with the Pitcairn based 7800 series, AMD is instead going straight to the bottom and launching the Cape Verde based 7700 series first.
Today AMD will be launching two cards based on the Cape Verde GPU: the Radeon HD 7750, and the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition. As the Juniper based 5700 series never got a proper Northern Islands successor, this is the first real update for the x700 series since the launch of the 5700 series in October of 2009. Given the success of the 5700 expectations are going to be high, and to fulfill those expectations AMD will be bringing to bear their new GCN architecture along with a full node jump with TSMC’s 28nm process. But will this be enough to enable the 7700 series to replicate the success of the 5700 series? Let’s find out.
AMD GPU Specification Comparison | |||||||
AMD Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition | AMD Radeon HD 7750 | AMD Radeon HD 6850 | AMD Radeon HD 5770 | AMD Radeon HD 5750 | |||
Stream Processors | 640 | 512 | 960 | 800 | 720 | ||
Texture Units | 40 | 32 | 48 | 40 | 36 | ||
ROPs | 16 | 16 | 32 | 16 | 16 | ||
Core Clock | 1000MHz | 800MHz | 850MHz | 850MHz | 700MHz | ||
Memory Clock | 4.5GHz GDDR5 | 4.5GHz GDDR5 | 4.8GHz GDDR5 | 4.8GHz GDDR5 | 4.6GHz GDDR5 | ||
Memory Bus Width | 128-bit | 128-bit | 256-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | ||
Frame Buffer | 1GB | 1GB | 1GB | 1GB | 2GB | ||
FP64 | 1/16 | 1/16 | N/A | N/A | N/A | ||
Transistor Count | 1.5B | 1.5B | 1.7B | 1.04B | 1.04B | ||
PowerTune Limit | 100W | 75W | N/A | N/A | N/A | ||
Manufacturing Process | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 28nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | ||
Architecture | GCN | GCN | VLIW5 | VLIW5 | VLIW5 | ||
Price Point | $159 | $109 | ~$149 | ~$99 | ~$89 |
With the 6000 series AMD effectively had a 5 chip stack: Caicos (6400), Turks (6600), the rebadged Juniper (6700), Barts (6800), and Cayman (6900). Since then integrated GPUs have effectively wiped out the low end of the market, and by the time Trinity launches later this year any product short of 6600 performance should be made redundant. As a result AMD has reigned in on their spread out stacks, leading to their 28nm Southern Islands product stack being just 3 products: Cape Verde (7700), Pitcairn (7800), and Tahiti (7900). Anything below the 7700 series will be rebadged Northern Islands parts, primarily Turks and Caicos.
But AMD’s product stack doesn’t tell the whole story. AMD will need to cover a wide range of products and price levels with only 3 GPUs, ranging from $109 to $550. As a result the performance levels of AMD’s various product series are being redefined somewhat, and nowhere is this more apparent right now than with the 7700 series. Why do we say that? Well let’s take a look at the specs and pricing.
Cape Verde, the GPU at the heart of the 7700 series, is AMD’s smallest 28nm GPU. With a die size of 123mm2 it’s only a hair bigger than the 118mm2 Turks GPU that powers the 6600 series. In terms of functional units we’re looking at 10 Compute Units, giving Cape Verde 640 SPs and 40 texture units. Elsewhere Cape Verde packs 16 ROPs, 1 geometry engine/rasterizer pair, and 512KB of L2 cache, with the chip coupled to a 128bit GDDR5 memory bus. Altogether compared to Tahiti this is around 31% of the CUs, 33% of the memory bus width, and half as many ROPs.
Interestingly, unlike Tahiti, Cape Verde’s CUs are organized slightly differently. GCN is designed around 4 CUs in each CU Array, with the 4 CUs sharing a read-only L1 instruction cache and a read-only L1 data cache. This is how both the 7970 and 7950 are organized, with the 7950 simply lopping off a whole CU array. However with Cape Verde 10 CUs doesn’t cleanly divide into groups of 4, so for the first time AMD has built something a bit different. In Cape Verde there are 3 CU arrays, populated in a 4/3/3 manner. With regards to performance there shouldn’t be a huge difference, but this does mean that there’s a bit less cache pressure on the CUs occupying the smaller CU arrays.
On the functionality side of things, backing up Cape Verde will be the rest of the Southern Islands family features we’ve already seen on Tahiti, such as DX10+ SSAA, PowerTune, Fast HDMI support, partially resident textures, D3D 11.1 support, and the still-AWOL Video Codec Engine (VCE). Even FP64 support is accounted for, however similar to how NVIDIA handles it on lower-end parts it’s a performance-limited implementation for compatibility and software development purposes, with FP64 performance limited to 1/16th FP32 performance.
As for the cards themselves, AMD will be releasing two Cape Verde cards: the Radeon HD 7750, and the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition. The 7770 will be a fully enabled Cape Verde with all 10 CUs (640 SPs) enabled, running at 1GHz for the core clock and 4.5GHz for the memory clock, with a PowerTune limit of 100W and an AMD defined typical board power of 80W. The 7750 meanwhile has 2 disabled CUs, giving it 512 SPs and 32 texture units, while the ROP count is unchanged at 16. The core clock will be 800MHz while the memory clock is the same as the 7770 at 4.5GHz, with a PowerTune limit of 75W and a typical board power of 55W. Both cards have a sub-10W idle TDP, while long-idle is sub-3W.
With those specs in mind, it’s interesting to note that the difference between the 7750 and 7770 is much wider than we’ve seen in past products. Compared to the 7750, the 7770 has 25% more CUs and a 25% core clock advantage, giving it a massive 56% shader and texture performance advantage over the 7750. With the 5700 series this gap was only 35%, and most of that was a result of core clock differences. The fact that the memory bandwidth is the same between the 7770 and 7750 equalizes things somewhat, but it’s still a huge difference for two cards that are in the same family.
This brings us back to where we started: how AMD is covering the entire $109+ market with only 3 GPUs. Between the massive performance gap between the 7700 series cards and the fact that the 7750 is a sub-75W part, it becomes increasingly obvious that the 7700 series is the de-facto replacement for both the 6600 series and the 5700 series. The 7750 will fill the 6670’s old role as AMD’s top sub-75W card, but as we’ll see its performance means it won’t be a complete replacement for the 5700 series. Instead the role of replacing the 5700 series falls to the much more powerful 7770.
As for today’s launch, AMD will be launching the 7750 at $109 and the 7770 at $159, which happens to be the same prices the 5770 and 5750 512MB launched at respectively. With midrange cards there usually aren’t any supply issues and we aren’t expecting the 7700 series launch to be any different, however as is customary AMD’s partners will be launching semi-custom cards from day one, so pricing will probably be inconsistent.
At these prices the 7700 series will be competing with a number of last-generation cards. The 7750 will be up against AMD’s 5770/6770 and the absolute cheapest of NVIDIA’s GTX 550 Ti cards. Meanwhile the 7770 will be competing with AMD’s 6850 and 6870, along with NVIDIA’s GTX 460 and their cheapest GTX 560s. And as we’ll see in our benchmarks, this is ultimately going to be more than the 7700 series can handle.
Winter 2011/2012 GPU Pricing Comparison | |||||
AMD | Price | NVIDIA | |||
$209 | GeForce GTX 560 Ti | ||||
$179 | GeForce GTX 560 | ||||
Radeon HD 6870 | $169 | ||||
Radeon HD 7770 | $159 | ||||
Radeon HD 6850 | $139 | ||||
$119 | GeForce GTX 550 Ti | ||||
Radeon HD 7750 | $109 | ||||
Radeon HD 6770 | $99 |
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chizow - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.There's a reason we look at the past, because chances are, what's already in your rig performs the same or better than what AMD is trying to sell you at the same or higher price than what you paid "in the past".
Everyone needs to set the bar for themselves in terms of what they are willing to pay for an "upgrade", and given there is negative scaling with these parts, its pretty obvious they fail on all fronts. But hey, even you acknowledge this.
Galidou - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
Those with a choosen side should not try to explain whatever the history tells us because they have a biased opinion. They can't see both side of the medal as objectively possible as someone with an impartial view and form the beginning you've proven to be on nvidia's side.End of the discussion, you can try to explain history but it's YOUR perception. I never said history wasn't worthy of anything the thing is you always are on the same side which means it's worthless from the very beginning.
Galidou - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
I do not think it's a TOTAL fail, the 7970 and 7950 isn'T very well priced, but it's not a fail like those. From your point of view a fail is from historical pricing. From my point of view and ALWAYS was like that, it's from a performance/price standpoint and I won't change because you tell me we should look at everything things from the past. Sure we can learn from it.There was once a man that beleived the earth was round. But the historians and everyone else beleive it was flat so they killed him. No need to put names in there... History used as an argument makes that sometimes.... You've got to renew your point of view else, you can't see further from what you know.
AMD is trying to sell you at the same or higher price than what you paid "in the past".
Like we said before, nothing new here, it's always the same with x2 parts from last gen for years now... And it's only an example from many others of rebranding older designs selling at higher price point which AMD and Nvidia are both strong at.
Galidou - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
The price is a failure from my perception, 7770 and 7750 is a big fail..... Unlike 7950 and 7970 non-attractive price/performance but still a little justified by it's performance compared to parts that are out NOW and not compared to freaking history of pricing or future video cards...People out there will buy the 7770 and they'll be totally satisfied for as long as they'll own the thing. If you spent 4 hours on the internet looking at video card prices and benchmarks and realize you're way better off with a 6850 you might find it a bargain. But for others, if you tell them what you did to get to that conclusion, they'll maybe end up being happy with their choice without searching because they had 4 hours of playtime outside on a sunny day and that's worth it, while you're on the computer looking to spend your money on the best you can find.
So in the end, whatever we might say, perception is the key in life, we can take a whole day speaking about that and in the end, everyone will be right, because each of us create it's reality by thinking and seeing it the way THEY want... You want to live in the past and the future analyzing everything, you'll end up loosing the present which is the only thing that exists...
chizow - Sunday, February 19, 2012 - link
Yes Rarson, its proof stupid people have low standards and will buy anything. How's your 7700 treating you?Plenty in stock actually: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Sub...