GPUs dont change architectures very often, but when they do, it is big news. AMD's new Radeon HD6900 GPUs are the largest single change from that company in three and a half years, so lets dive in to the architecture.
Yesterday, AMD launched the HD6900 line, the latest in the 'Northern Islands' family of chips. Due to a lot of problems not related to the architecture, this family has gone through more major changes than any chip we have heard of to date. The end result is a card that is quite different from it's smaller brethren, and quite different from the preceding four generations of cards.
What changed? The biggest thing was the core of the GPU, the shaders. With the HD2900 architecture in May of 2007, ATI's architecture was called VLIW5 (Very Long Instruction Word). This processed a bundle of five instructions per clock, which ATI counted as five shaders.
Read the rest of the in-depth review here.
via SemiAccurate
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