| JEMC said: Of course I agree. My disappointment with the rumored 32CUs for the 8600 is not related to its possible performance, but its possible memory configuration. We don't know if AMD has changed it or not, and so those 32CUs made me think of a 128bit card with, yet again, 8GB. For a card that should hopefully perform like the 7700XT, that's not enough. Hopefully, that's not the case, but the doubt will remain until we know more. |
CU's have zero correlation to the memory controllers and memory sizes that the GPU interfaces with.
I.E. 7900GRE and 7800XT are 60CU and 80CU with 120 and 160 ROP's respectively, both run on the same 256bit bus that interfaces with 16GB of Ram.
AMD years ago also decoupled it's ROPS from it's memory controllers when it adopted a crossbar memory controller, so it could parry up any memory bus width with any number of ROP's which have a direct relationship with the CU's.
In saying that... If AMD adopts fast GDDR7 32GT/s then their 128bit bus would offer 512GB/s of bandwidth anyway, which is equivalent to a Radeon 6900XT.
But AMD also obfuscates it's memory bandwidth deficits by using large, fast, chunky caches.
There are lots of variables and unknowns at this point, but there is room for tangible gains even if they retained a 128bit memory bus.
In saying that, current leaks (Grains of salt) are suggesting a retaining of GDDR6, but with a 192bit memory bus @ 19Gbps which would mean the 8600XT would have 468GB/s of bandwidth which is still more than the 7700XT and 6750XT.
But other technologies may be thrown in like an improved delta colour compression and better culling/discard.
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