In the wake of the HD 6900 series debut last month, the Barts GPU and its place in the product line finally makes perfect sense. The Cypress chip, as used on the Radeon HD 5830 with 334 square millimeters of silicon, is way too big for just 1120 shaders and 16 ROPS. The new Barts GPU uses just 255 mm2 to do the same job only better, thanks to twice the number of ROPs as the 5830. Although TSMC denied AMD the opportunity to roll out 32nm-based chips for this product cycle, they went back to the drawing board and optimized this new generation of GPUs for the current 40nm manufacturing process. AMD did a better job of reading the rule book last time, and their first full line of 40nm GPUs dominated the graphics market for a full 6 months. AMD has now successfully inserted an additional class of GPU (as defined by die size), to fill the performance gap that existed in the Radeon HD 5000 series.
The rumours of custom PowerColor Radeon VII GPUs are false
AMD has updated their RX580 to the 12nm FinFET process. Let's see how the PowerColor Red Devil copes with these enhancements.
PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 offers decent performance and is a good candidate for affordable VR Ready performance from the red camp.
