AMD Radeon HD 8000 Oland Is 33% More Efficient than Radeon HD 7000 Tahiti Part 2

AMD is now displaying a slightly different GPU strategy as the company seems to believe its GCN Gen 2 architecture will bring enough performance improvement that the design team can focus on power consumption reduction.

We recommend you read Part 1 of our AMD Radeon HD 8000 “Oland” Report before going any further as we’ll make quite a few comparisons with previous generations of video cards.

It’s an interesting development that the company seems to believe the new GCN generation of video cards will have enough performance and its now concentrating on reducing the power consumption.

Compiling the transistor increase and the projected power consumption, we could say that the “Oland” GPUs are 33% more power efficient than “Pitcairn” despite being manufactured in the same 28nm technology.

The transistor increase is significant, but not nearly close to the 70% transistor jump from the 40nm Radeon HD 5770 to the Radeon HD 6870.

Even when moving from Radeon HD 6870 to Radeon HD 7870, the transistor count was also increased by 64%, but the power consumption also grew from 151 watts to 190 watts despite the change in manufacturing technology from 40nm to 28nm.

Comparing HD 6870 to HD 7870 is quite tricky as the two are not manufactured using the same technology, but we’re trying to emphasize that even with a change to a smaller manufacturing node, the transistor increase led to a power consumption increase.

AMD is now increasing the transistor count, but at the same time they are reducing the power consumption and this is the first time that the company has managed such a feat during the past few years.

The 21% increase is not that dramatic and this is clearly a conscient decision to go for power consumption reduction.

It also hints at the fact that the GCN Gen2 chips will actually have considerably higher performance.

AMD believes that the “modest” 21% transistor count increase will make the 3.4 billion transistors “Oland” faster than a 4.3 billion transistors “Tahiti” GPU or a GTX 680 for that matter.

This seems to be AMD’s plan and it only remains to be seen how much of it will actually go this way.


Via: AMD Radeon HD 8000 Oland Is 33% More Efficient than Radeon HD 7000 Tahiti Part 2