http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/oem-solutions/Pages/oem-solutions.aspx

AMD has listed five more on their site:  Radeon HD 7670, 7570, 7470, 7450, and 7350.  But look at the specs:  they're a Radeon HD 6670, 6570, 6450, 6450 (again!), and 5450, respectively.

I didn't like the 5770 and 5750 becoming the 6770 and 6750, respectively.  But there you could at least make the case that they were still fairly modern cards.  Not so with renaming 40 nm cards into a 28 nm lineup.  The older cards also lack DirectX 11.1 support, PowerTune, and some other modern features that the "real" 7000 series cards will bring.

So far, these are still only OEM cards.  So you'll see companies like HP try to convince their customers that it really is a 7000 series card, but they won't show up at New Egg.  Or at least, not yet.  But the 6770 and 6750 started out as OEM cards before ending up available to everyone under the new name.

So why is AMD doing this?  My guess is that Southern Islands doesn't contain any true low end GPU chips, and their business model is to keep selling 40 nm GPU chips to fill the low end.  If even the bottom bin of Cape Verde is a $100+ card, then a lot of people simply aren't going to pay that.  The charitable explanation is that renaming cards into the 7000 series indicates that this is what AMD has for such customers in 2012.

So why not make new GPUs at the low end with the modern features?  TSMC's 28 nm process is in high demand, but still has limited capacity, so they're charging a lot per wafer.  Higher end cards have to move to the 28 nm process for a variety of reasons.  For lower end cards, it would be nice, but isn't as critical.  So AMD decided to move the higher end cards to 28 nm and keep the lower end at 40 nm for now.

I'd expect that AMD will eventually launch some lower end 28 nm cards, but that might have to wait for the Radeon HD 8000 series.  By then, TSMC's 28 nm HPL process node should be mature and have plenty of capacity.

Now we just wait to see if Nvidia renames their old cards into a new series, too.  Kepler is still a while off, so there isn't yet a need to rebrand the lower end Fermi cards into a Kepler series for the same reasons that AMD is doing rebrands.  But then, Nvidia's GeForce 100 and 300 series cards were pure rebrands, so I wouldn't be surprised if the 600 series ended up that way, too.  Even the GeForce 500 series cards were a mere respin.

I read a short article about this on Anandtech. Really, the base technology that a consumer cares about (which would be DirectX support at DX11) hasn't changed since the Barts introduction - and if you want to be brutal about it, most people and games don't use anything past DX9 anyway (because of poor support from developers mainly).

Yes, PowerTune could be a big deal in the OEM segment - if only because you could take one die, set PowerTune to whatever level your chassis allows you to run at, and use a common die in many different product points. But realistically, it won't - they want the cheapest part they can possibly cram into the product for the highest profit margin, having 800 different SKU's isn't a problem for the manufacturer, only the consumer trying to keep track of it all (and that plays to the manufacturer's benefit). Most people don't know what video card their computer uses, nor do they care, so long as it plays Facebook games.

Turks was a good architecture all in all - it's still capable. It's just not shiny and new. I don't think anyone is going to be upgrading from a 5670 to a 6670 to a 7670 expecting any kind of performance increase (or at least I would hope not, even though it got a minor boost when it went from Evergreen to Barts) - they aren't performance parts in the first place. All your missing out on: PCI 3.0, PowerTune, ZeroCorePower, DX 11.1 - none of which really matter in the low end segment (and that's all the OEM segment really is, low end GPU's just powerful enough to play mainstream games on moderate settings).

My guess as to why AMD is doing this: They have a high end product now. Either they they don't know how the die distribution is going to be over the long haul in order to split it out, or there just isn't the production support yet to make additional dies in order to support lower end products (and their subsequent customer demand). My suspicion is that they are doing it because they and nVidia have done it successfully and extensively in the past, and they can just get away with it. Another guess would be that they don't really care how fragmented the discrete market gets, they are going to be pushing the APU - and those video dies are going to be set with the CPU. Low end OEM discrete cards allow them to pair and AMD GPU with the competition's CPU - not the most ideal situation for AMD. Better than a total loss of sales, but not as good as providing the total integrated package. Make the alternative very confusing, and your ideal path very simple, and it makes the choice easier for the consumer who just wants their stuff to work.

Cayman never did trickle down to a lower end part either, and Southern Islands is a pretty big leap from VLIW4 to RISC (Graphics Core Next Gen), so it hasn't reappeared in any of the Southern Island dies (yet). Maybe we'll see 7800 series be rehashes of the current 6900 series (which all in all wouldn't be bad I don't think, so long as they shoot for the current 6800 price points). I know we have become somewhat accustom to a particular generation of GPU's all being loosely based around a single architecture, but with the unified driver model, there is no real reason that has to be the case, and we are seeing a slow but steady deviation from that; where lower end dies are older technology, and only the high end dies get manufactured from the latest process and with the latest generation design.

AMD is only focusing on their top end cards :(  which yay for enthusiast gamers `('-')`  I can't wait for Kepler to release... Lets go GREEEN. The Only AMD card that catches my possible interest is the 7990, the 7970 (from what I can see, including the fact that it will slightly improve with drivers) is that it's barely better than a higher end gtx580. So I will just save the money for the 7990 or top tier Kepler.

Originally posted by Quizzical

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/oem-solutions/Pages/oem-solutions.aspx

AMD has listed five more on their site:  Radeon HD 7670, 7570, 7470, 7450, and 7350.  But look at the specs:  they're a Radeon HD 6670, 6570, 6450, 6450 (again!), and 5450, respectively.

I didn't like the 5770 and 5750 becoming the 6770 and 6750, respectively.  But there you could at least make the case that they were still fairly modern cards.  Not so with renaming 40 nm cards into a 28 nm lineup.  The older cards also lack DirectX 11.1 support, PowerTune, and some other modern features that the "real" 7000 series cards will bring.

So far, these are still only OEM cards.  So you'll see companies like HP try to convince their customers that it really is a 7000 series card, but they won't show up at New Egg.  Or at least, not yet.  But the 6770 and 6750 started out as OEM cards before ending up available to everyone under the new name.

So why is AMD doing this?  My guess is that Southern Islands doesn't contain any true low end GPU chips, and their business model is to keep selling 40 nm GPU chips to fill the low end.  If even the bottom bin of Cape Verde is a $100+ card, then a lot of people simply aren't going to pay that.  The charitable explanation is that renaming cards into the 7000 series indicates that this is what AMD has for such customers in 2012.

So why not make new GPUs at the low end with the modern features?  TSMC's 28 nm process is in high demand, but still has limited capacity, so they're charging a lot per wafer.  Higher end cards have to move to the 28 nm process for a variety of reasons.  For lower end cards, it would be nice, but isn't as critical.  So AMD decided to move the higher end cards to 28 nm and keep the lower end at 40 nm for now.

I'd expect that AMD will eventually launch some lower end 28 nm cards, but that might have to wait for the Radeon HD 8000 series.  By then, TSMC's 28 nm HPL process node should be mature and have plenty of capacity.

Now we just wait to see if Nvidia renames their old cards into a new series, too.  Kepler is still a while off, so there isn't yet a need to rebrand the lower end Fermi cards into a Kepler series for the same reasons that AMD is doing rebrands.  But then, Nvidia's GeForce 100 and 300 series cards were pure rebrands, so I wouldn't be surprised if the 600 series ended up that way, too.  Even the GeForce 500 series cards were a mere respin.

Originally posted by Robgmur

AMD is only focusing on their top end cards :(  which yay for enthusiast gamers `('-')`  I can't wait for Kepler to release... Lets go GREEEN. The Only AMD card that catches my possible interest is the 7990, the 7970 (from what I can see, including the fact that it will slightly improve with drivers) is that it's barely better than a higher end gtx580. So I will just save the money for the 7990 or top tier Kepler.

If you've already got a GeForce GTX 580, there's no dire need to upgrade, and wouldn't be no matter how fast the 7970 was.  But for someone who doesn't already have that high end of a card, the Radeon HD 7970 pretty much makes the GeForce GTX 580 pointless unless it gets some steep price drops that probably won't be forthcoming.

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I'm not terribly disappointed that AMD isn't offering low end cards on 28 nm in the immediate future.  They probably will do so eventually, once the 28 nm process node is more mature (higher yields, lower design cost) and cheaper per wafer.  It makes sense from a business perspective.  I do wish that they (and Nvidia) wouldn't resort to renaming old cards, though.

So its the same card just renamed ?

Originally posted by Quizzical

Originally posted by Robgmur

AMD is only focusing on their top end cards :(  which yay for enthusiast gamers `('-')`  I can't wait for Kepler to release... Lets go GREEEN. The Only AMD card that catches my possible interest is the 7990, the 7970 (from what I can see, including the fact that it will slightly improve with drivers) is that it's barely better than a higher end gtx580. So I will just save the money for the 7990 or top tier Kepler.

If you've already got a GeForce GTX 580, there's no dire need to upgrade, and wouldn't be no matter how fast the 7970 was.  But for someone who doesn't already have that high end of a card, the Radeon HD 7970 pretty much makes the GeForce GTX 580 pointless unless it gets some steep price drops that probably won't be forthcoming.

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I'm not terribly disappointed that AMD isn't offering low end cards on 28 nm in the immediate future.  They probably will do so eventually, once the 28 nm process node is more mature (higher yields, lower design cost) and cheaper per wafer.  It makes sense from a business perspective.  I do wish that they (and Nvidia) wouldn't resort to renaming old cards, though.

 Yes, the companies should hold off on releasing the lower end cards until the 28nm becomes for feasible for lower tier, to avoid a pointless launch of cloned cards with different names. But $ is $

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Originally posted by Robgmur

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Originally posted by Quizzical

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Originally posted by Robgmur
AMD is only focusing on their top end cards :(  which yay for enthusiast gamers `('-')`  I can't wait for Kepler to release... Lets go GREEEN. The Only AMD card that catches my possible interest is the 7990, the 7970 (from what I can see, including the fact that it will slightly improve with drivers) is that it's barely better than a higher end gtx580. So I will just save the money for the 7990 or top tier Kepler.

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If you've already got a GeForce GTX 580, there's no dire need to upgrade, and wouldn't be no matter how fast the 7970 was.  But for someone who doesn't already have that high end of a card, the Radeon HD 7970 pretty much makes the GeForce GTX 580 pointless unless it gets some steep price drops that probably won't be forthcoming.
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I'm not terribly disappointed that AMD isn't offering low end cards on 28 nm in the immediate future.  They probably will do so eventually, once the 28 nm process node is more mature (higher yields, lower design cost) and cheaper per wafer.  It makes sense from a business perspective.  I do wish that they (and Nvidia) wouldn't resort to renaming old cards, though.

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 Yes, the companies should hold off on releasing the lower end cards until the 28nm becomes for feasible for lower tier, to avoid a pointless launch of cloned cards with different names. But $ is $

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I have mixed feelings.

I don't think you should simply rename a card - having a different model number implies that something is different. The 5670 to 6670, for instance, actually involved a change (albeit very minor, for all intents and purposes they are pretty similar but the silicon was updated to be a bit faster). The 6670 to 7670 is misleading - those are exactly identical, and there is no difference.

On the other hand, given the choice between buying a 2012 car and a 2011 car with no other difference, for the same price, most people will choose the 2012, even if they didn't really change anything. So in that regard, I can see why they push old silicon ahead with a new series name just to keep the niche in the series filled, even if they didn't make new silicon for that niche for that generation.

So why I feel that it shouldn't be done with video cards, but it's perfectly acceptable with cars (and has been done for decades), I don't really know.

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Originally posted by Robgmur
AMD is only focusing on their top end cards :(  which yay for enthusiast gamers `('-')`  I can't wait for Kepler to release... Lets go GREEEN. The Only AMD card that catches my possible interest is the 7990, the 7970 (from what I can see, including the fact that it will slightly improve with drivers) is that it's barely better than a higher end gtx580. So I will just save the money for the 7990 or top tier Kepler.

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I tend to think that "better" gets somewhat subjective. There is more than just frame rate or texel fill speed or polygons per second to a video card.

I think PowerTune alone made AMD superior to nVidia, even if the 6970 didn't match up quite as well with performance numbers. There's also performance per watt to consider, and that leads to total cost of ownership (which most people totally disregard, I grant you), as well as thermal performance.

The fact that a 7970 can even match a 580, let alone best it in a handful of performance metrics, blows my mind. Add in that it still has PowerTune, now has ZeroCorePower for Crossfire or APU configurations, and only a 210W TDP (which with PowerTune, is a guaranteed ceiling, not an average or best case scenario like nVidia's 244W TDP for their 580) makes it an amazing piece of silicon.

Performance isn't everything. It's important, but there are other things that I consider. I like nVidia, don't get me wrong, I think that just right now they are still playing catch-up to the 5870. Once nVidia gets their power use under control, they will be monsters again: just like Intel took off once they realized that performance wasn't everything, it's performance per watt that really matters: the Core series was an amazing improvement over the Pentium 4, and not only made Intel competitive versus Athlon, it give them the significant advantage once more.

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Originally posted by Cabaloc
So its the same card just renamed ?

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The 7670 is mostly identical to the 6670.

The 7570 is mostly identical to the 6570.

The 7470 and 7450 are mostly identical to the 6450 (only differ in DDR3 vs GDDR5)

The 7350 is mostly identical to the 5450.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5291/amd-quietly-releases-the-oemonly-radeon-hd-7670-turks-rides-again

And...

The 7600M is mostly identical to the 6750M.

The 7500M is mostly identical to the 6630M.

The 7400M is mostly identical to the 6470M.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5200/introducing-amds-radeon-7000m-and-nvidias-geforce-600m-mobile-gpus

I say "mostly" because there are a few details which are either unconfirmed, or differ minorly (such as memory bus size or RAM type).

super lame, they better actually make new cards

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Originally posted by CalmOceans
super lame, they better actually make new cards

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So far, the only new new card is the 7970, and it ~just~ started shipping.

The 7950 is still up in the air, although it looks to be a fewer-core version of the 7970 (so it will also be new), retaining the 384bit memory bus, to be released in February. There are the "Tahiti" chips. The 7970 is a 210W TDP, the 7950 will be just under that (probably 185W~ish). Crossfire is supported up to 4 cards. The 7970 starts at $550 (same price point the 580GTX started at), and will probably drift to around $500 as soon as availability picks up and rebates/specials start. No price data on the 7950 yet - I'd expect it to be in line with retail 570GTX/6970 prices though.

News on the 7800 series (Pitcairn) is that it looks to be even farther scaled back 28nm on a 256bit memory bus. I've seen rumored price points (7870 at $299, 7850 at $199 -- or whatever their names happen to be, so far the rumors only peg two of them in the series) - and a rumored release near the end of February. I couldn't find TDP numbers, but I'd expect 140-170W range (fitting right in between Tahiti and Cape Verde).

The 7700 series (Cape Verde) also is supposed to be a new 28nm die, similar to Pitcairn and Tahiti, but dropping down to a 128bit memory bus. These are rumored to be in the 100-125W TDP range, and limited to x2 Crossfire. Again, rumored availability is late February.

All of these will be 28m, based on the new RISC GraphicsCoreNext - with PowerTune, PCI 3.0, DirectX 11.1, ZeroCore Power, etc.

And everything below the 7700's will be rebranded old chips. Lots of rumor sites say there will be VLIW4 rebrands (the current 6900 series with PowerTune), but I haven't seen any indication of that.

Can't wait till the day they can start making these GPU'S the size of an iphone for desktops .

I'm glad people purchase the new cards at launch but for the most part I run on a budget and only recently upgraded my old 5770 to a 6870 because the fan on the card sounded like a jackhammer and was on the verge of burning out.  Why didn't I go for a 7 series? The 6870 is a tried and true card that cost me about the same as a 5770 did at launch also I would still be using my desktop and playing my games perfectly with the 5770 if it wasn't on it's last legs.

I suppose if you've bought an SSD already and have money to burn then go for it but why bother with the latest series when good manufacturers are trying to clear the shelves of cards that will stand up to anything for years to come at a cheap price? Perhaps there has been a market slump and investing in the lower end of the 7 series isn't viable right now?

Originally posted by Ridelynn

 

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Originally posted by CalmOceans
super lame, they better actually make new cards

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So far, the only new new card is the 7970, and it ~just~ started shipping.

The 7950 is still up in the air, although it looks to be a fewer-core version of the 7970 (so it will also be new), retaining the 384bit memory bus, to be released in February. There are the "Tahiti" chips. The 7970 is a 210W TDP, the 7950 will be just under that (probably 185W~ish). Crossfire is supported up to 4 cards. The 7970 starts at $550 (same price point the 580GTX started at), and will probably drift to around $500 as soon as availability picks up and rebates/specials start. No price data on the 7950 yet - I'd expect it to be in line with retail 570GTX/6970 prices though.

News on the 7800 series (Pitcairn) is that it looks to be even farther scaled back 28nm on a 256bit memory bus. I've seen rumored price points (7870 at $299, 7850 at $199 -- or whatever their names happen to be, so far the rumors only peg two of them in the series) - and a rumored release near the end of February. I couldn't find TDP numbers, but I'd expect 140-170W range (fitting right in between Tahiti and Cape Verde).

The 7700 series (Cape Verde) also is supposed to be a new 28nm die, similar to Pitcairn and Tahiti, but dropping down to a 128bit memory bus. These are rumored to be in the 100-125W TDP range, and limited to x2 Crossfire. Again, rumored availability is late February.

All of these will be 28m, based on the new RISC GraphicsCoreNext - with PowerTune, PCI 3.0, DirectX 11.1, ZeroCore Power, etc.

And everything below the 7700's will be rebranded old chips. Lots of rumor sites say there will be VLIW4 rebrands (the current 6900 series with PowerTune), but I haven't seen any indication of that.

good info thanks :)

That's weak, renaming older cards to make them sound better than they actually are is weak.

I am not particularly found of the myriad of cards they make today anyways, in the old days we only needed a few cards. You need  high end card, a cheap one and a middle card but that is it, the rest just exist so people like Dell and HP can trick customers with low computer skills into thinking their card is better than it actually is.

I miss 3DFX...

LOL its not like ATI are the only ones to have done this hell NVIDIA did it with the 9 series range, was basically just the 8 series stuff re-named.

Not that i give a flying crap about low end cards anyway LOL..

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Originally posted by Caldrin
LOL its not like ATI are the only ones to have done this hell NVIDIA did it with the 9 series range, was basically just the 8 series stuff re-named.
 
Not that i give a flying crap about low end cards anyway LOL..

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This is largely true - the upper tiers are usually well defined, clearly labeled, with traditional price points, and there are usually only 5 or 6 cards in this range. It's once you get into the sub-$100 market that it really starts to fragment and get really confusing - they all perform pretty poorly, but there are (seemingly) hundreds of SKU's between AMD, nVidia, and even Intel.

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Originally posted by Agricola1
I'm glad people purchase the new cards at launch but for the most part I run on a budget and only recently upgraded my old 5770 to a 6870 because the fan on the card sounded like a jackhammer and was on the verge of burning out.  Why didn't I go for a 7 series? The 6870 is a tried and true card that cost me about the same as a 5770 did at launch also I would still be using my desktop and playing my games perfectly with the 5770 if it wasn't on it's last legs.
I suppose if you've bought an SSD already and have money to burn then go for it but why bother with the latest series when good manufacturers are trying to clear the shelves of cards that will stand up to anything for years to come at a cheap price? Perhaps there has been a market slump and investing in the lower end of the 7 series isn't viable right now?

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I don't blame you at all. The 5770 was a decent budget option a couple of years ago - it still performs adequately (in fact, it's still sold as the 6770...), but it isn't a horsepower monster by any means. Your 6870 was a decent step upgrade, and they can be found for pretty good bang for the buck, especially if you got it for the price of a 5770.

I usually skip a couple of generations - I get near the high end of a card, and it usually performs pretty well for 3ish years. Typically I only upgrade them because I'm bored: they usually still perform pretty well, but I get itching to try some new technology that comes out (in the last case, it was DX11 and PowerTune, going from a 265GTX to a 6970). My 6970 works well now, I don't see any need to jump to a 7970, and maybe not even the 8000 series depending on how far (or not far - thanks consoles) games evolve in that time. I'll probably end up upgrading my motherboard/CPU before the video card again (Intel i7 920).