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http://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-Radeon-HD7000-GPU-28nm,14121.html (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-Radeon-HD7000-GPU-28nm,14121.html)

Interested to hear from the horses mouth. Hope it's more a jump from previous generations GPU than Bulldozer was for their CPU line ;)

hmm will be interesting to see how well they do in mineing and how cost efficient they will be :)

http://videocardz.com/ati/radeon-7000/radeon-7970 (http://videocardz.com/ati/radeon-7000/radeon-7970)

IF those numbers are correct, it might be a bit underwhelming. 2048 shader processors @190W vs 1600 @188W for a 5870. Clocks are virtually identical. Assuming identical performance per shader per clock (I know, huge assumption) thats a nice improvement but not quite the quantum leap some may have hoped for.

The 79xx series use a completely different architecture (GCN).  You can't compare them clock to clock and shader to shader.
The bad news is that the new shaders are much more like Nvidia shader (more complex, more capable) which doesn't bode well for mining performance.  Each shader is more powerful but most of that power is wasted for something as simply as computing a hash round.

The 78xx series use the same exact architecture as the 6000 series (VLIW4).  Just smaller, cheaper, faster, cooler.  So IF there is a good mining card is likely will be in the 78xx series.  The 7850 looks like "the card" at least on paper. Still I wonder how popular that will be.  Gamers have been waiting a long time for a die shrink so expect to see a lot of cheap used hardware.  Cheap used hardware plus 2012 being the year of the FPGA I think the 7800 cards won't be adopted heavily.

Now maybe (longshot) AMD new architecture will amaze us but I think the 79xx will be duds for mining, although awesome for gaming (and maybe more complex GPGPU tasks).

https://i.imgur.com/FXmCe.jpg

As far as the 7850 being "the card".  It is essentially a 6950 which uses half the power in a budget card.

6950
Clock: 800MHz
Shaders: 1408
TDP: 200W
Price: ~$250

7850
Clock: 850MHz
Shaders: 1408
TDP: 95W
Price: ~150 (my guess based on AMD normal price points)

The 7870 doesn't look too bad either.  About 20% higher performance for 20% higher wattage than it's little brother.  However I think (guess) AMD will price it more than 20% higher.  Likely $200 and $150 making the 7850 the better buy.

The new GCN architecture is very interesting.

It's different from the one of the current cards and the mining performance may sucks, but it will be much more useful for like almost every other GPGPU applications out there

True, GPU mining is dead anyway.

Same!

ATI may intro a new HD 6930 card too (with pricing info about 7950 and 7970 inside article):

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-gpu-hd-6930-graphics-card,14162.html

Dec 2

7990 6GB ram http://lenzfire.com/2011/12/amd-radeon-hd-7950-7970-dual-gpu-7990-price-specs-89652/

Could this be true ?

It is probably true and the next generation of the architecture will not be any good for mining.

78xx may be good but don't expect greater performance than VLIW5 and the 5970 and 5870s cards.

VLIW4 still is inferior to VLIW5 when it comes to mining. Wonder if we will ever see another card like the 5970 with 3200 ALUs.

Probably no.

While it is inferior clock for clock and ALU for ALU the overhead isn't that bad.  6xxx series don't underperform the 5xxx series by much.

The 7xxx series has the huge advantage of a die shrink and that means (slighly less than) double the performance per $ and per watt.  The performance per $ gain isn't that exciting but imagine all 6000 series GPU suddenly using half the power.  That is pretty cool.

However the 79xx are likely going to be poop.  The architecture is really geared towards large complex interactions that simply don't existing in SHA-256.  The wattage (guestimated by looking at connector types) is also worse.  That likely is from the power hungry and ultra fast XDR ram (which is beyond useless for mining).

http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/item/25171-amd-tahiti-needs-8-pin-and-6-pin-power-connectors

So I stand by my earlier statement that the 7900 series is going to be poop when it comes to mining.

The 7850 & 7870 "may" be decent miners but given the huge availability of used 5xxx series GPU, the rising performance of FPGA designs, and the fact that mining capacity likely needs to decline not grow makes me think that even the 7850/7870 are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.


Of course will will.  Moore's law marches on.  7990 has less ALU because they are more complex but it is still ~1600 ALU.  AMD won't stop making more powerful cards.  In say 2 years they will have a next-gen card (8000 series?) and the most poweful dual GPU card will likely be ~3200 ALU.  

http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/Some-Details-About-AMD%E2%80%99s-7000-Series-Graphics-Cards-Leak-Internet

Some speculation on pricing.

Looks like 7850 may be $199 at launch (not as attractive as my guesstimate of $150).  7870 might be $299 which would be worthless for mining.  Honestly I don't see that price holding.  Should have ~20% higher performance for 33% higher cost.  Gamers aren't going to like that.

I think the 7850/7870 pricepoints will slip after the launch day demand dies down.

Poop for mining, good to hear that.  ;D

Has that been confirmed, or is it still speculation?

Just going by the $/MH it's not that great, but it's a 95w card, which is pretty good.  That's about half what a 5870 does.

Dec 5 came and went... No sign of REAL cards.

http://www.3dnews.ru/news/621341/
http://www.3dnews.ru/news/621328/
use google translate )

http://www.3dnews.ru/news/621520/

Crazy hot, I wish I was a gamer,... :o   Boring FPGA here I come.  :'(

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?277324-Radeon-HD-7000-Revealed-AMD-to-Mix-GCN-with-VLIW4-amp-VLIW5-Architectures

Personally id go with this,

7800s are going be pants. Same as 7700 :( FPGA is the only way now)

79xx - CGN
78xx - CGN
77xx - CGN
76xx - Turks
75xx - Turks
74xx -Caicos
73xx - cedar

CGN will SUCK for mining

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/12/16/low-end-radeon-hd-7000-series-rebrands/

Has this been confirmed ? Is there no die shrink of the current cards like 6970 -> 7870 with VLIW4 or VLIW5 and based on 28nm etc. ?

Same :( Gutted

But i'd put my money on that site over all the force fed b$ sites out there. Thinq_ / Semiaccurate & tech eye seem to have the juicier stuff but is short in order :(  All other sites seem to be PR to me

28nm now shipping to OEM says AMD (just 7970 & 7950 only)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-Tahiti-Southern-Islands-Radeon-Rory-Read,14288.html

Also I doubt the above report.  It is the only one indicacting 7800 & 7700 will be CGN.

Still from a personal perspectives. 
CGN = better for games.
Lack of VLIW in 7800 series = my collection of 5970s just became more valuable for miners.
I still think 7800s won't be CGN but if they are not a huge problem for me.  I am likely running these 5970s until I move into FPGA anyways.  ;D

http://semiaccurate.com/2011/12/16/low-end-radeon-hd-7000-series-rebrands/

http://semiaccurate.com/assets/uploads/2011/12/hd7000_discrete_lineup1.png

^^ Slow on the uptake gabi :)

S/A may have the famed charlie but i go with what they say more than any other tech site as they actually do some journalism and not go to the same sources to hash the same B$. But it as got worse of late :( But tech is boring tbh. Silicon should have gone 5+ years ago. All the billions spent on going down from 40nm to 20 and below could have had graphene in mass production but noooooo, Intel seem to buy/kill any competitors. Face it, Silicons at a brick wall. Compare AMD to Intel when there at the same die shrink, 40nm vs 40nm etc. Intel suck. Ranting aint i.

I'm ok with my setup until FPGA, i'm already invested infact in FPGA with a whopping 288 shares of 3000 lol.

I managed to extract the following from the 11.12 driver:

Cypress: VLIW5
Juniper: VLIW5
Redwood: VLIW5
Cedar: VLIW5
Cayman: VLIW4
Barts: VLIW5
Turks: VLIW5
Caicos: VLIW5
WinterPark: VLIW5
BeaverCreek: VLIW5
Loveland: VLIW5
Tahiti: GCN
Pitcairn: GCN
Capeverde: GCN
Devastator: VLIW4
Scrapper: VLIW4

So I'm inclined to believe recent reports that all of the higher end cards are using GCN.

Nice find although rather gutting. I hope GCN will be good for mining but i got about 1% on that. I was hoping for good 78xx series :( 6950/6970 will be popular after price drop......

Deathandtaxes - Only death is guaranteed ;) and you willing wager a bet on this. I know my sources boy :P  5 BTC seasonal bet :)

Interesting that the slide above shows SHA256 performance, it's almost like AMD figured out who was buying all those video cards...

Curious 5870 vs 6970 vs 7970 compare, clock for clock and watt for watt ?

SHA256... bit dumb question but whats that? Raw calculating power? And if so, are there PR people saying its better than a 6970 for mining? Be surprising as the 5870 was already better than the 6970 so it would be a step foreward..... again..... lol

PR slides like that mean diddly squat, but still interesting what PR companies come up with. '3 times durable', 'OC Genie' etc etc. What happened to good old jumpers and fiddling :)

So what is that chart showing? Utilization or (power?) efficiency?
Either way, doesnt look like a huge improvement for bitcoin. But indeed, nice that they show it.


Lol? Weren't you mining at a few GH/s? SHA256 is the hash algorithm used by bitcoin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2

p4man and deathandtaxes are my favourite people around here don't you know! Sorry i don't know p4man to your superior knowledge... (SARCASM) I have a life too.

And yes, I'm mining fine at a profit and i've had my bill. Even at a lowly $2 i was still in the + so that pisses on yours and deathandtaxes bombfire with all your technicalities. I've just cashed 200 BTC in for £460 with the crimbo NY rush. I expect it go up to the end of the week and then drop to its 2.5 - 3 $ where it stands. Thats until spring season with holidays when it goes up, and next Halloween time and then November the BTC goes down to 25 BTC per block which will cause a bit of madness but Christmas an NY will be bonkers next year :)

Stick that in your pipe and eat it and i bet i'm right, I know cause i look at it from an outside view. NOT FOR PROFIT as you 2 do. As i've said a million times, I'm off on vacation for 2 months, blab to you later :P

Interesting thing is that the chart is PER MM^2.  There is a die shrink thus each transistor is half as large.  With no architectural changes one would expect SHA256 performance to be (roughly) 2x simply due to the die shrink.  Right?  Isn't the chart indicating (once you factor out the die shrink) that the 7970 architecture is worse @ SHA-256 than a 6970?  (i.e. if the 7970 was manufactured @ 40nm instead of 28nm it would be worse or if the 6970 was manufactured @ 28nm it would be better).

Now if only the SHA bar was the AES one.  It shows what a little optimization can do (performance gain is far beyond what die shrink alone would achieve).  It makes sense AMD would optimize AES performance.  AES is more likely used by everyday users than SHA.  Winzip for example announced new version which is OpenCL accelerated to allow strong encryption/decryption of files much faster than CPU based versions.   I would expect other archive utilities (7zip hopefully) to follow suit.

Interesting point on the MM^2, It would make it something like 60% less efficient or something if what you say rings true. This would be on par with Nvidia's cards more or less as predicted.

Time will tell i suppose, Not long now :)

Yes, I've had his shit when i was only trying help and advice people on OC'ing and what not. Kept telling me i'm a moron. Well who's the moron making money and going on a 2 month vacation now! He is a loser. Deathand taxes at least comes up with some good suggestions. I got 1 thing wrong (i said 5990 not 5970 but i believe its been rebranded or different AIB's using 5990). So i was right i believe on that as well.

I offer my insight and opinion and am willing be corrected and ask questions, not just jump on someone cause your opinion id different. All my stuff comes FROM REAL WORLD KNOWLEDGE, i wonder about p4man myself..... Get the men in white!

Wait.. so what's the verdict?  Does the 7-series suck for hashing or not?

Too early to say and the data from various sites conflicts each other.

We do know AMD has broken the 7000 series into three "groups"
7900 series (7950, 7970, and dual GPU 7990) - This is definately a new architecture (CGN) which doesn't look very SHA friendly.
7700/7800 series  -  THE BIG UNKNOWN.
7600 series - OEM junk low end crap.  This will be die shrink of 6000 series cards.  In theory would have good efficiency but each card is so low powered that likely not very useful.

Some sites say the 7700/7800 series cards will be old architecture.  If they are, then on paper the 7850 looks like a monster hashing cards.  However some newer articles indicate the entire 7700/7800 series will be CGN.  If that is true then likely it will be bad hashing performance.

All depends on who you believe however the future doesn't look bright.

The money spent on mining rigs would just be put into FPGA boards. Yes, twice the price+ but the power savings are IMMENSE! Plus more people design/buy FPGA which WILL happen if the 7800/7700's are screwed up. THen becoming more viable to the average joe who's interested and AMD lose whats basically holding them up above NVIDIA. AMD (or NVIDIA) need to design a dedicated mining card. There missing a trick the size of jupiter by not doing.

p,s, AMD/ATI please, Don't want no bumpgate cheapo nasty oven cookers thank you :P (personal opinion)

following this madness

LOL, "Technicalities" as in  first grade math using numbers you supplied for electricity cost and hash rate?  But keep thinking your overvolted cards are somehow 10x more profitable than anyone else's despite you having twice the electricity cost.

Here is a hint: your electricity supplier probably uses moving averages, so you havent paid all your electricity cost yet. But do keep at it, you'll get rich.

For those curious, here  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51210.msg611820#msg611820)is a quote:


As it turns out, your own stated BTC revenue didnt even cover half your stated electricity cost.  But Im the idiot that did learn math. Of course they never taught me your miracle solution :


I should put that in my sig. Its golden.

I just heard that that the HD7970 is close to the HD6990 in the benchmarks shown on this link:
http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/item/25259-radeon-hd-7970-close-to-hd-6990

If this is anything to go by,then it may be very good for mining as well.

Overclocking this card would get this even closer to a HD6990 though.I hope this is repeatable for mining as well.

If it is using CGN then I think it still will suck. Reality right now is that 5870 and 5970 were the best mining cards ever created. All the rest suck for integer heavy operations like Bitcoin and bruteforcing stuff.

Thanks for the info.It looks like we'll still be using HD58xx,HD5970s and the top end HD69xx series cards then for a lot longer than I expect.Looks like the HD79xx and HD78xx won't be the most suitable cards for mining then.Guess I'll have to wait for FPGAs and more previous gen cards to be affordable then. If minings not the HD7xxx strongpoint then what do they work best with?

Man, You might be the biggest troll i've ever know. I spoke to the electric company if you read this post and got my bill IN DETAIL OVER THE PHONE. Your quoting me when i was 'guesstimating' with OTT to cover my ass. Turns out it i was always in the + WITH OC'ing them all to 965/300 to get that 400m/hash with ease each. As i say, Even @ $2 i still made a small profit, Not 6x admittedly, but again, i was guesstimating as I DON’T DO THIS SOLELY FOR THE MONEY FOR THE LAST TIME LIKE YOUR SAD ASS! Jesus man. Do you listen or just spurt diarrhoea at me?

Do you realise i was only giving advice on OC'ing cause people were asking also back in them ANCIENT threads, and good advice on OC'ing at that, Better and more helpful than you do. You just like flaming people. But i LOVE banter so i'll just steam roll it back in your face. I've helped and been helped by people on here and even deathandtaxes is becoming interesting, just as long as he doesn’t keep his dik up your ass we'll be ok :)

I'm making at least 2x what i put in at $4 mate so i exaggerated 6x, but when i started it was 10-15$ ass wipe. I do multiply my bitcoins (your just too dumb to work it out cause your blind sighted or just dumb to the world cause of your trolling) and have just cashed a load in and going away for 2 month before years out. So yes, BTC's are working perfectly fine for me but if your suffering, That's your loss. Not that the cash IS THE POINT FOR ME, IT'S THE PRINCIPLE/IDEA! But i bet that goes over your head! are you 14 or something p4man!

Why am i even replying to this turd. It's gets me nowhere as he just wants to flame and not listen, Thats obvious. Is it me or is it him? I'm sure its him! He's a massive troll isn’t he and i aint seen ANY help to anyone from him! Does he even mine? p4man, I've accepted my few errors but i hate to inform you that they are minor and even less minor to me personally. IF BTC dies (somehow) im in it for principle/idea, so something new will come along with the same principles or even better. It's about removing the 1%er's for me and living my own life my own way out of the system. I got my own mind, How about you?

BTW

@ Holliday - I don't have evidence no, its my opinion. Is all. I'd like see evidence showing that it doesn’t make them money.... i know that alot of 5 series cards would still be around if it wasn't for mining. And 6 series at that. Old 4 series cards still play modern games and 5 & 6 series will run games for the next 3-5 years on max detail. Core2 Chips still run modern and all upcoming software FAST! Why would people upgrade unless they have more money then sense or an enthusiast? A 6870 can run almost all games on ultra, Thats a 5770 equivalent. BF3/Deus EX etc. Only game i found it wont is STALKER:COP with ADD-ONS such as SMRTER/AtmosFear etc as it rwuire 3GB video Ram with add-ons. So why upgrade to a 7 series when 5 & 6 are perfectly fine and 7 WILL have issues initially due to new design. 6 series should have been skipped completely, No need if you ask me. No real improvement over 5 series IMO and often wasnt as fast as the direct related 5 series. Sad.

If the 7970 is as fast as a 6990 thst would be nice for gamers who want to play....... STALKER COP..... haha :) Good thing with 7 series is die shrink of cause which should make it a nice upgrade for anyone with less than a 5 series. 5-6 series are fine imo. FOR GAMING THAT IS. Mining is 58xx/59xx/68xx/69xx and thats it. 7 will suck.

FPGA for the win anyways, It's obviously the future with lower power requirements, Less heat and lower cooling bills. I use 12" extraction which works but more VGA would require some tinkering.

7 series.... i recon it'll fail to impress, Even gamers if they have a high end 5-6 series, Power saving is the only reasonable thing going for it if you ask me. Personal opinion there again p4man. I caln have them you know, Own mind and all, try it sometime....

Still havent opened a math book and looked up divisions it seems.

At your stated electricity price of $0.25 (16 pence) per KwH, at your stated $2/BTC price, do the math and tell me how many MH/W you need to achieve break-even even with todays difficulty (which is lower than when you made that claim). Its not rocket science.  Hint: its over 3MH/W.

Your claim of earning 6x your electricity cost was hilariously false when you first made it, and your current claim is just as false today. No GPU based mining rig achieves 3MH/W. Definitely not your overvolted 69x0 cards.
Welcome to my ignore list.

Back to the cards.

Fan noise for all your sleeping needs.
http://www.forum-3dcenter.org/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=9089776&postcount=2343

3 coins a day @ £2 each x7 = 63x4= £252 for 28 days mining. My electric bill is 100-110 a month. THats how i do my maths. Even 2 coins a day or a drop to £1.33($2.08 ill have you know) would give me £168 still leaving a profit. And i invest my BTC and work them so stick that in your pipe and smoke it!

your defo on my ignore list mate, Go into as many details as you like, ill go by hard figures i have in front of me :) Been good banter, i do love it :P

btw

slaveindebt - I cant read that, can you explain. Looks german or dutch :)

I am sorry to say this, but now it is you who sounds like a 14-year old... with an inferiority complex.


True
Can you predict btc prices too?
Nope.
6870 is 10% faster than 5850 (in games, as you started talking about games, for sha256 5850 ofc wins)
5770=6770 (same chip)
5770 slightly slower than/same as 4870
5770 is 40% slower than 6870
http://tpucdn.com/reviews/HIS/Radeon_HD_6870/images/perfrel_1920.gif
 
Let's wait and see. The price will be most important if reduced wattage is to be the main change over 5xxx

Well,I get 840 m/hash(420 each with OC'in) with my crossfire 6970's @ 740 watts(entire PC with fans & AMD 965 quad).My electricity is .11 kwh=about $60-80 per month.Still profitable,but barely.

I rock BF3 so I'm getting my moneies worth ;D

I'm watching & waiting..........the 7000's need to beat that by 30-40%(power consumption or hashing) for me to even think about upgrading.

Doubtful I'll upgrade my GPU's anyways as FPGA's are looking more promising,but @ almost $600 for 300+ m/hash its still a bit much too invest just yet,if they come down to around $400 or so..............

You could sell your 6970 and get a 5970+5850 (or 5830 at least)

You could also underclock and undervolt your CPU to 1 GHz or less... unless you ain't only mining with it :D

Well,MSI Afterburner crashes my PC when playin BF3 or BC2,so I'm stuck using CCC or whatever it is.So no underclocks for my mem...........& the 6970 xfire is soooo sweet 8)

As for CPU,I OC my FSB to 206,a little extra for the games ;)

But my gaming is more important than mining for now,unless we hit $8-10 per coin......or more :-\

+ gameing is anger management for me :o

Thanks for the info ;D

Weird, i just hit "Reset" on MSI Afterburner before playing and everything run fine, BF3 too

After this last patch I noticed my frame rates dropping to like 1-2fps every now and then.  Usually it's around 80-120.  It happens often enough to be REALLY annoying, and sometimes the game will just lock up for me.  It usually occurs when I turn really fast or scope-in -- basically whenever I encounter an enemy player, lol perfect timing!

I did some searching and there's currently no fix for it, but some people have had success by updating their audio drivers (for those using Realtek onboard audio).  Also disabling CCC's "AMD Optimized" tesselation seems to help as well.  Unfortunately I've yet to find a fix that works on my system. :(

malevolent -- Point taken, i just get carried away with banter sometimes :) Actually i dont give 2 shits about the 7 series no more haha.

BF3, i kick ya ass in heli. Was 89th in world before on BF2. I got BF3 after i promised not to buy EA again for £7.50. Paid 11.99 for expansion for been a BF2 sucker ha. Me and a good co pilot and you aint got a chance with the new systems.

FPGA for the win, whatever adios, see you next year

http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/2472/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review

http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image//skymtl/GPU/HD7970/HD7970-65.jpg

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/49646-amd-radeon-hd-7970-3gb-review-22.html

Well,we are always looking for good players to fill our server,check us out,we have our own 64 man server & a private server for us to practice on.Just come & kill,we're not stars at the game but we do have a great time,we also use Mumble for comms:)

http://theblackduck.net/araven/

Hope you get your game goin Mouse,would be fun to see some guys from the "Bitcoin place" in game :D

We have some fixes we found out about on our forum,so check em out & hope one of em gets you up & playin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BTW,my name in game is my name here 8)

That is quite impressive, though I doubt the ~2x speed boost will entirely translate to mining. Many of the benchmarks from the review showed more like a 50% increase, anyways. Cost-wise, at a MSRP of $550, so $450-$500 at Newegg, it still would not be as good a deal as older cards in MH/s per dollar. Electricity costs could be cut, certainly, but if electricity is your main hindrance to profitability, FPGAs will still be way more efficient in MH/s per joule.

With the 28nm core I expect we will be able to overclock higher and run them cooler which should yield better results.

Like the rest of you, I'm waiting impatiently for someone to get some hashing numbers.  Exciting stuff, though!  Why not release it last week so sell them for xmas?  If I was in charge of this world, that's what I would have done.

http://www.3dnews.ru/news/621750/

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7970-benchmark-tahiti-gcn,3104.html

No way. See the efficiency.

http://www.tomshardware.de/AMD-GCN-Tahiti-Graphics_Core_Next-HD_7970,testberichte-240931-14.html

HD7970: 414 Mh/s @ 254 W
HD5870: 375 Mh/s @ 190 W

Ah, excellent news. Cant wait to buy some cheap 58x0 cards from gamers upgrading to this.

in English

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/radeon-hd-7970-benchmark-tahiti-gcn,review-32344-14.html

spiccioli.

Too soon to see mining performance, mining software still has to be optimized.
More: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/22

Got a nice stock of 5870s. Happy right now. ATI = fail yet again.

IMHO they are still pretty damn smart and they want to compete with Nvidia. Nvidia blows ATI for things like weather forecasting, folding and other important scientific, real world changing stuff. The catch ? Bitcoin is integer and folding ( GPGPU computing in general ) is based on floating point and DP ( double precision ). The 58xx were EPIC for integer but crap at floating point. The CGN crap is bringing more FP to the table to compete with Nvidia. We have to face it : Bitcoin / integer / bruteforcing is still a tiny share of the market ATM.

I wouldn't call it "ATI = fail yet again".

The 5000 & 6000 series cards are based on a concept of LOTS of simple shaders.  The issue is that a 7000 cards based on the same architecture would likely have way MORE but relatively inefficient shaders than a mainstream video game can use.  Pixel count isn't rising as fast as it was in the past.  The number of effects isn't rising either but gamers are expecting more complex and immersive effects.  The more to more complex shaders was inevitable.  If it wasn't the 7000 series it would be the 8000 or 9000 series.  

It just is bad news for miners as SHA-256 is pretty damn simple.  It only takes in the hundred millionth of a second range to complete a hash.  Other than Bitcoin nothing needs that much hashing power.  Other integer performance seems to be doing fine.  NQueen is a classic non-cryptograpy integer based problem and the 7970 is roughly 2x as powerful as 5970.     AES even got a nice boost, it will be nice to use GPGPU to open encrypted files 20x faster.  

AMD never intended for Bitcoin to be fast with their videocards.  It was more like a very lucky coincidence we got as good of performance as we did.  Now the trend is towards more powerful shaders and that is likely going to break that beneficial happenstance. 

Makes me glad I am sitting on 16 5970s though.  


On edit:  I wonder how much L1 cache the GPU have.  Would be beyond funny if these cards did great a so called "GPU unfriendly chains". 

Not sure why he included that chart.  It is FLOATING point performance.  It has nothing to do with Bitcoin mining.

Well there is no guarantee.  AMD may be pushing these cards harder than 40nm models.  Remember 40nm is pretty mature now so getting yields high is almost trivial which means you have lots of very good chips (more than you can use in the best cards).  Sometimes after a die shrink overclocking hits a brickwall until they work the kinks out. 

I remember one Intel CPU after a dieshrink that couldn't be overclocked more than 2% without crashing.  Intel was selling the chip at almost redline because they didn't have good enough yields to use a better quality chip for that part/pricepoint.


AMD wanted to have it in stores 2 weeks ago.  The chips are made by TMSC and they had delays.  Nothing AMD could do but watch and see Christmas shopping season vanish.

Pffft, bullshit.

Try projects like Milkyway@Home (that's a DOUBLE PRECISION one), Collatz Conjecture or Moo! Wrapper. Nvidia sucks there.

Yes but what is the difference between those examples / Bitcoin and something like Folding@Home or WCG ?

The marketshare. F@H and WCG etc. are big while those examples and Bitcoin is relatively small in terms of penetration.

May be a tiny share, but we ARE on the radar.  We have the 5th bullet on the main overview page.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/7000/7970/Pages/radeon-7970.aspx#1

Wow, the fact that they speak about mining on their website is a great thing

WCG is cpu-only so far.

And Folding well... check the statistics now, ATI contribute most to their computing power, then nvidia then cpu. Ok i know, this is only because a tons of bitcoin miners started folding, and 1 nvidia still kickass tons of ati on folding
But maybe with GCN things will change

1% faster than 6990 would be "faster than ever".  :)

  That is fuggin insane that AMD even mentions mining....  Maybe we could just freakin ask them if CGN or other new 7x tech will mine better than 5x/6x and if they have more data to share on it.......?? Someone? ;p

Multiple websites have already reviewed the 7970 and one published Bitcoin mining.

Posted upthread:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/radeon-hd-7970-benchmark-tahiti-gcn,review-32344-14.html

http://media.bestofmicro.com/Y/O/320064/original/itmining.png

So roughly 5% faster.  Given it is a die shrink one would expect a shrunk and doubled 6970 to be 70% to 80% faster.  CGN uses fewer more complex shaders and just like NVidia that results in lackluster mining performance.

http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/4763/37629648490452d2e891z.jpg (http://www.gametrailers.com/user-movie/the-bates-4000/265867)
^ ^ Video ^ ^ (so funny)

Wow, 6970s get nearly 400 MH/s straight out of the box?

The 7970 shouldn't even be considered for mining; GCN is AMD's version of Fermi. It is marginally faster than a 5870, sure. But it uses 30% more power to achieve 10% faster performance (250W for a 7970 vs 190W for a 5870). Not to mention a 7970 will retail for $500, compared to $200-$250 for 5870.

Nothing to see here; move along. But I'm glad to see a commercial site like Tom's review the card for bitcoin mining. The 5870 is still the card to beat. At least until the 78xx series is released; those should be just as quick for mining and use 1/2 the power.

Maybe not.  The early reports/leaks indicated that 78xx would use VLIW5 and if they did I agree a 78xx is a no brainer better mining card.  The bad news is later reports have now indicated that 7800 and 7700 series cards will also be CGN.  Only the OEM low end junk 7600 series will be a die shrink of 6000 series.  If so then there likely will be no "good" new mining card.

Hmm, I wasn't aware of that latest news tidbit ... I was operating under the assumption that the 78xx would be VLIW5. If they are GCN as you suggest (Graphics Core Next), like the 79xx, then 2012 will not likely see better GPUs than the 58xx/59xx or 69xx.  :(

Yeah I am not sure what to think some sites are indicating GCN some VLIW5 and AMD hasn't confirmed one way or the other.  The 7800s are suppose to launch sometime in late Feb so likely we will know more as it gets closer to launch date.

Uh,420 m/h with 11.6 drivers & 930/1375 OC on GUIminer/win7...but consumes 375 watts.In crossfire 840 m/h uses 740 watts.Not using MSI AB.

Temps are 72c @ 90% fan speed(very noisey).

Stock got me 360 m/h.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150517

BTW,while gaming @ the OC'ed clocks,I use 440 watts in crossfire(BF3),big diff compared to all out mining ;)

I don't think they OC'ed the 7970 at all,so with some tweaking you might see 450-475 m/hash,just guessing though.As long as power consumption drops,it might not be too bad,BUT @ $500+,not a good bang for the buck :(

http://i44.tinypic.com/15q6we0.jpg

http://lenzfire.com/2011/12/entire-gcn-lineup-hd-7000-series-specs-and-price-revealed-60538/

If this holds up, then SI looks like a bust for mining.  All GCN and pricey.  For example, the 7850 has less cores than 6950 and cost about the same.  From the comparison of 6970 with 7970, it looks like GCN cores don't mine as well either. 

Are the 76xx's going to be a die shrink of the 6xxx's or still on the 40nm?  If they're a die shrink they still might be worthwhile, current 66xx's can do 100mhsh/s

They almost certainly will be a die shrink.  Once 28nm gets established there cost per transistor is lower.  Not sure if even a double the 66xx would be worth it. 100MH/s even doubled is just 200MH/s per GPU?  You got FPGAs that can pull that.  Granted some people might be interested but density is going to suck if the "best" miner is ~200MH/s.  

930/1375 OC != "straight out of the box".

I didn't think 6970s could hit 395 MH/s out of the box, unless they (Tomshardware) did some tweaking to theirs just to make it benchmark slightly above a 5870.

Total BS in that article. Most of my 5870s can EASILY get a maximum of 440 Mhash/s when slightly overclocked to 960 MHz.

6XXX sucks compared to 5XXX. Even a 6990 sucks compared to the 5970 king ATM. A 6970 can almost never beat a 5870. 

Nobody really knows how the 7XXX will perform or behave until some months after release to allow for optimizations and OCing.

GCN Architecture
http://developer.amd.com/afds/assets/presentations/2620_final.pdf

THG didnt overclock any of those card in that mining test. They got 375MH which is exactly what Im getting from my 5870 at stock speed. 375.3 to be exact.  That I can overclock mine to 1 GHz is irrelevant, THG could also overclock their 7970 to >1.1 GHz. Hashrate scales perfectly with clock.

This is going to be an interesting year.  Because I get very cheap power and the FPGA scene is still a bit murky, I'm not planning to make a big FPGA investment for a while. 

To me, the 7870/50 seem to be the most enticing as a stop-gap before we all move to FPGA/ASICs.  Granted, the prices will be high at first and supply probably constrained, but with a 120/90W TDP respectively, they could pay for themselves pretty quickly.

The nominal wattage is less important than MH/W.  Based on the 7970 that looks to be inferior to 5870 & 5970.

Right.  So for the 7870/50 (not 7970), you're talking 390/330-ish mh/s (my estimate) at only 120/90W or about 3.25 to 3.66 mh/W.  With a 5970 you're getting ~650 mh/s at 300W, or about  2.16 Mh/s.

Where do you get the idea you are going to get 390 MH/s from a 7870?  The latest reports/rumors is that the 78xx will be CGN like 79xx series.  The 7870 has 62% of the shaders of a 7970.  Somehow it will get 90% of the performance w/ 62% of the shaders?

414 * 0.62 = 250 MH/s on 120W = 2.1MH/W.

Also a 5970 get closer to 750MH/s at 250W.

What's your source for saying that the 7870 will be CGN?  I haven't seen anything other than it will be a 28nm die shrink of the VLIW4 architecture with 1536 shaders, same as a 6970, which gets about 390mh/s.  You usually get a small bump in speed with the die shrink, so you should get at least 390 Mh/s, probably a bit more.

As for the 5970, I have quite a lot of them running in my data center.  Looking at the console output right now, my slightly overclocked (750MHz/300MHz) 5970's, using phatk2 and the usual phoenix miner optimizations are getting 340 mh/s per core or 640 mh/s total.  I haven't been able to get 375 per core without increasing voltage (and good cooling).  Thus, I doubt you're getting 750mh/s speed under 300W.  I can hook up one of my rigs to 120v with a kill-a-watt and check the next time I'm at the data center.

There are a lot of them, some in this thread.  The early reports seemed to indicate a die shrink.  The later ones now indicate only the low end OEM garbage will be a die shrink rebadge.  I agree with you (and had stated it in the past) IF the 7850 is a VLIW4 on 28nm it will be a monster card.  Sadly that doesn't seem to be the case.


I have to break it to you but those number are pure crap for a 5970.  Not just against what I have gotten but against what lots of other people have gotten.  The limit on each card varies but my slowest card is running 820Mhz/160Mhz.  3x5970 in open air rig pulls 870W at the wall (measured over 3 days using kill-a-watt).  Backing out 100W for the MB, power supply inefficiency, CPU, RAM, etc that puts each card @ roughly 250W a piece.  That is w/ cgminer 2.1.0 running on Linux w/ 11.6 drivers & 2.4 SDK.

If you aren't getting AT LEAST 700MH/s you are doing something horribly wrong.  Note: 700MH/s isn't "good" it is just barely acceptable.

If that's the case, then I'm really disappointed.  I'm quite reluctant to jump into FPGA's anytime in the near future, so I was hoping I could get some power efficient cards in the meantime.  Grrr.


My math was bad in my previous post.  340x 2 = 680, not 640.  That's what happens when you've been up all night without sleep  ;D

Most of my 5970's I have been running at 800Mhz, but stability has sucked (suckage = a stalled miner once in three days), so recently I've dropped it down to 750-ish.  I'm on pretty much the same setup as you.  Ubuntu 11.04 x64 with 11.6/2.4 drivers/SDK, though I use phoenix directly with my own scripts.  I'm sure I could get more out of the 5970s, but I simply don't have time for that.

Uhh, Zed doesn't think so. Neither does Google Spreadsheets.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqP-aJPTwJFodEhkUC1ZU3JQVGp6QkpYUHZYTTNSanc

Looks like closer to £58/month (28 days) at your £2.00/coin rate.

Are you using a Pentium with the FDIV bug for doing your math?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

Just sayin'

- Zed

Now THAT'S a blast from the past....

His bug is far worse than than the FDIV bug, that one was was pretty obscure. m3sSh3aD's brain bug produces far more and far greater errors and in each and every attempt at math.

He posted earlier his electricity costs £0.16 per KwH. to get to £110/month means £0.15/H. So he would be mining at barely over 1000W
Hes mining mostly on heavily overclocked and overvolted 69x0 cards.
To get 3 BTC per day, you need ~3.5GH. @1000W?

Show me a GPU mining rig that gets anywhere near 3.5MH/W.

I think you could do it with some serious underclocking and undervolting on the right hardware.   Maybe....

If I ever get bored I may try to see what is the highest MH/W possible using one of my 3x5970 rigs.  I think I could make 3.5MH/W.

Sounds like a fun challenge.

What BS is the crap coming from your mouth.

Run your card at stock then come here and eat your own BS.

Is that the one where if you input "@[=g3,8d]\&fbb=-q]/hk%fg" (quote included) and press Delete, you get sucked into the internet?

Nice challenge. Hope you can find the time one day and show us if it is possible !

No, I think that is is the one where you get a visit from the Men In Black, or maybe the Man With One Red Shoe? I can never remember.

The FDIV bug is the one that allowed banks to honestly claim there was error in their spreadsheets. I know, "honest bank" sounds odd.  :)

- Zed

Is that where this saying came from?:

"I am Pentium of the Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated"

It is amusing how threads can deteriorate. But this is +1 for sure!