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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silverblue - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
With any luck they'll become plentiful in a short space of time, offering early adopters the chance to set up a decent EF, umm, setup.If you think the typical EF setup will be two or three monitors, do you expect the full six monitor glory with an X2 part? I'm still wondering if even the 5870 can handle three monitors and still offer smooth gaming performance. That said, despite their power they're not going to strictly be gaming cards.
papapapapapapapababy - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
the fact that this cards consume little power is irrelevant when you have that great efficiency on the 5800... also including the Eyefinity gimmick here is a mistake, it only diminishes the value of that feature on the 5800. It should have been 1 card. HD 5770:no Eyefinity, 800 SP, 750MHz, 512MB = $99 USD
CarrellK - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Eyefinity (EF) will be in all 5xxx products for a multiplicity of useful reasons, many of which aren't apparent yet. There will be frequent roll-outs of new EF goodness. There will be many, many customers who will find EF very useful. Hopefully you will realize what EF can do for you and buy one of our products. We'd like for you to be a happy customer of ours.CarrellK
yacoub - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
" It should have been 1 card. HD 5770:no Eyefinity, 800 SP, 750MHz, 512MB = $99 USD "
Close, but no. 1GB of VRAM is mandatory anymore, and it needs the 256-bit bus or more texturing units and ROPs. And then it could be $125.
yacoub - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Something's wrong when two of these in CrossFire can't match a single 5850. Blah.qwertymac93 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
why no mention of 4770? i know its older and slower, but its also 40nm like the 5750 and is the same price, it would be nice to see the difference between the two as they are specked quite closely(640sp@750mhz, 720sp@700mhz, both 128bit gddr5)snarfbot - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
legion hardware has a good review comparing them both.the 5750 is between 1-3 fps faster.
the 5750 has better overclocking potential thanks to the ram i guess, but im not sure if its worth the extra 25 bucks.
kinda a wait and see thing for this part
Seramics - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Yet another good reviews from AT, thanks Ryan. However, it becomes clear cards like HD5870 and HD5770 isnt a very good performer for its price. HD5850 and HD5750 512MB repeesents a more solid bang for bucks. Again its very amazing that AMD has been able to bring us so many next gen DX11 cards when Windows 7 isnt even launched yet and their competitor is being super slow by onli recently releasing a non high end part of G200 derivatives. That being said, from the point of view of solely performance, Cypress and Juniper is kinda a disappointing performer for its price, as well as for its specifications.pullmyfoot - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Hmm. I was expecting the 5770 to perform either at the 4890 levels or slightly slower at very least while running cooler and taking up less power. This is quite disappointing. I was all ready to get one to replace my 4850 if the price was right. I wonder how well they can tweak the drivers for this thing.yacoub - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link
Same here, although I'd replace my 8800GT with it. I expected about 25% more performance, and about $10 less MSRP ($150).