AMD’s Radeon HD 5770 & 5750: DirectX 11 for the Mainstream Crowd
by Ryan Smith on October 13, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
4 chips in 6 months.
This is the schedule AMD’s GPU engineering teams committed themselves to for the launch of the Evergreen family. The entire family from top to bottom would be launched in a 6 month period.
Last month AMD took the first step of that plan with the launch of Cypress, the forebear of the family and the source of the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850. Today AMD is taking the next step in the launch of the Evergreen family by delivering the 2nd and final Evergreen chip of the year: Juniper. Or as the products based off of them are known as, the Radeon HD 5770 and 5750.
| ATI Radeon HD 5870 | ATI Radeon HD 5850 | ATI Radeon HD 5770 | ATI Radeon HD 5750 |
ATI Radeon HD
4870
|
ATI Radeon HD
4850
|
|
| Stream Processors | 1600 | 1440 | 800 | 720 | 800 | 800 |
| Texture Units | 80 | 72 | 40 | 36 | 40 | 40 |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Core Clock | 850MHz | 725MHz | 850MHz | 700MHz | 750MHz | 625MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) GDDR5 | 1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5 | 1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) GDDR5 | 1.15GHz (4.6GHz data rate) GDDR5 | 900MHz (3600MHz data rate) GDDR5 | 993MHz (1986MHz data rate) GDDR3 |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Frame Buffer | 1GB | 1GB | 1GB | 1GB / 512MB | 1GB | 1GB / 512MB |
| Transistor Count | 2.15B | 2.15B | 1.04B | 1.04B | 956M | 956M |
| TDP | 188W | 151W | 108W | 86W | 150W | 110W |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 55nm | TSMC 55nm |
| Price Point | $379 | $259 | $159 | $129 / $109 | $140-$160 | $109-$129 |
In our 5800 series launch article, we briefly discussed Juniper and the other members of the Evergreen family. With Cypress a bit too big and a bit too expensive to hit mainstream prices, a new chip was introduced in to AMD’s usual 3 chip stack to cover that segment of the market, and that chip was Juniper.
What’s Juniper? In a nutshell, it’s all of Cypress’ features with half the functional units (and no Double Precision for you scientist types). DirectX 11, Eyefinity, angle-independent anisotropic filtering, HDMI bitstreaming, and supersample anti-aliasing are all accounted for. For more information on these features, please see our Radeon 5870 launch article from last month.
With half of the functional units left behind, we’re left with 10 SIMDs, giving us 800 stream processors and 40 texture units, while the ROP count has also been cut in half to 16, in turn giving us a 128-bit memory bus. If Cypress was 2 RV770s put together, then Juniper is the closest thing you’re going to see to RV770 coming out of the Evergreen family.
Juniper
With the reduction in functional units, Juniper becomes a leaner and meaner core. The transistor count is 1.04 billion, a little less than half of Cypress and about 100 million more than RV770. The die size of this resulting core is 166mm2, significantly less than both Cypress and RV770, the latter due to the smaller process size. RV770 for comparison was 260mm2.
From Juniper we are getting the 5770 and the 5750. The 5770 is a full Juniper, with all of Juniper’s functional units enabled and the card running at what amounts to a full speed of 850MHz (the same as 5850). The 5750 is slightly cut down, much like 5850 is compared to 5870. Here we have 1 SIMD disabled, and the core clock reduced to 700MHz. This is a notable departure from how AMD handled the 4870/4850 split, where 4850 was differentiated using a slightly slower core and much slower RAM, without the need to disable any SIMDs.
The smaller Juniper core also affords these cards lower power usage than the 5800 series. The 5770 is 108W at load and 18W at idle, meanwhile the 5750 is 86W at load and 16W at idle.
As an interesting aside, when AMD started sampling Evergreen cards to game development houses and other 3rd parties, they were Juniper based, and not Cypress based. The Juniper team was rather proud of this, particularly since Juniper came back from TSMC second. They also had less time to get their GPU up and working than the Cypress team did, since they had to wait on Cypress before being able to finish work on some elements. This is what makes AMD’s 6 month rollout all the more impressive, since it means the non-Cypress teams had less time to get their work done than they have in previous product cycles.
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7Enigma - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Because people are impatient and need instant gratification. This happens everywhere...erple2 - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
That, and people walking into stores to buy computer equipment aren't generally looking for the best deal.Ananke - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
I respect the MONEY :). Wasting money for something that doesn't quite fit my intention is not my way. But, people are different, I guess not everybody would do the same...My point is, better pay and get what you exactly want and need, otherwise later you'll regret. Now, if you have so much money to waste, buy anything :) that's different story.5770 with that anemic 128bit bus is worth less than $100, in my opinion. Above $100 it is just wasting money for getting nothing :)
just4U - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Thing is, people shopping for a new card probably do not have one of the latter cards.. or what they do have is fairly sub par. While they may have a good idea what they'd like to get...... alot of times you see them settle. Hell even those among us who are tech savvy have done that from time to time. Seems to me that's sort of what Nvidia's doing right now.
Hrel - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
I need a new card, I want it to be DX11, but the performance isn't there. I want something about 10 percent faster than a 1GB 4870 for about 150 bucks, and something about 10 percent faster than a 4890 for less than 200 bucks; with DX11. Once I see a card like that, from AMD or Nvidia; I'll buy it. Stupid X1650Pro is REALLY limping along in modern games and I'm starting to get sick of low res and min settings.Ananke - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Really good cards.....not worth the money though :)Did I just summarized it well ?
snarfbot - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
it would be nice to see some benches with crysis w/o aa.if they really are bandwidth limited that would make the difference.
also overclocked performance, if the memory is the limiting factor then the 5750 would probably be a pretty good bang for the buck.
Leyawiin - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
The HD 5850 was "wow". The HD 5770 is a little "meh". Its great you have something that sits between the HD 4850 and HD 4870 in performance with such low power requirements and noise, but that price has to come down.silverblue - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
I view the 5770 as a natural successor to the 4770/4830/4850 (so I wouldn't expect a 5830 to appear, for example) as opposed to a replacement for the 4870. By now I'd expect 40nm yields to be much better than a few months back when TSMC had issues producing the RV740 variants so hopefully any dies that are defective are only minimally so and ATI can put them on the 5750 cards. Makes me wonder about the lower-range cards due next year though.The Eyefinity ports are an enigma, however it could make for a very nice business class card assuming anyone can afford those dongles.
CarrellK - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
If you are building an Eyefinity (EF) setup, you prolly don't have three monitors. You prolly have one or two. This means you will be buying at least one monitor. My advice: buy a DP monitor that matches the physical size & resolution of your existing monitors. That way you don't need to get an adapter.CarrellK