First look at Radeon 8790M

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octoberasian

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Techreport did a first look at the Radeon 8790M:
http://techreport.com/review/24086/a-first-look-at-amd-radeon-hd-8790m
The 8790M has fewer shader ALUs than its predecessor, but at least in our test sample, its clock speeds are higher—and it comes packed with more memory. Also, of course, the 8790M is based on AMD's latest GPU architecture. Interestingly, AMD tells us it's made no refinements to the GCN architecture in the Radeon HD 8000M series. No new features have been added, either, beyond those that were already present in proper, GCN-powered 7000M-series parts.

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20% less ALU's, but a 50% increase in clock. Can anyone think of any scenarios where having less ALU's despite the higher clock rates would be a step backwards?

If this turns out to be true, I would have rather seen the same amount of ALU's, but maybe a 20-25% increase in clock rate.
 
Quite an impressive little card! Hopefully I can get my hands on a notebook with it in the next few months as I'm looking now.
 
DejaWiz said:
20% less ALU's, but a 50% increase in clock. Can anyone think of any scenarios where having less ALU's despite the higher clock rates would be a step backwards?

If this turns out to be true, I would have rather seen the same amount of ALU's, but maybe a 20-25% increase in clock rate.
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For whatever reason AMD did, the Radeon 8790M seems faster with the same architecture design, but less ALUs.

it reminds me when they moved from the VLIW5 to VLIW4 and the VLIW4 ended up a tad bit faster. That was before GCN architecture came.

I'm not sure whether to wait for this to appear in a laptop first, or wait for a Richland-based APU, or just get the top end Trinity-based laptop. I'm in need of a laptop upgrade soon.
 
I'd like a Laptop GPU that can handle Diablo 3 on max details at native resolution, with a steady 60fps.
 
NiHiL8 said:
Maybe so, but something that doesn't eat up 100W would be nice.
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Agreed. In desktop replacement "laptops" that won't move much it might be ok to have power bricks that weigh more than a sack of potatoes, but for anything really portable I'll tradeoff a few fps to not need wheels to lug my laptop around.
 
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