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AMD Reveals Radeon Sky Series For Cloud Gaming, Previews Radeon HD 7990

MojoKid writes "AMD made a number of interesting announcements today at the Game Developers Conference, currently taking place in San Francisco. AMD revealed their 'Radeon Sky' series of graphics products targeted at cloud gaming and virtualized computing applications. The company also showed off the dual-GPU powered AMD Radeon HD 7990, and extended the 'Never Settle: Reloaded' gaming bundle program to include BioShock Infinite. AMD revealed three Radeon Sky Series cards, two based on the Tahiti GPU and another based on Pitcairn. The top of the line Radeon Sky 900 is powered by two Tahiti GPUs linked to 6GB of memory (3GB per GPU). The Sky 700 is powered by a single Tahiti GPU and the Sky 500 is based on Pitcairn. All of the cards are passively cooled and are designed for cloud gaming / computing servers. The upcoming high-end, consumer targeted Radeon HD 7990 was also previewed, but few details were given. Devon Nekechuk, Product Manager of AMD Graphics, did say the triple-fan setup was whisper quiet. We think it's safe to assume the card features 6GB of memory and clocks are in-line with current Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition cards."

10 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. yeah whatever... by fredan · · Score: 4, Funny

    how many megahashes do they produce?

  2. NVIDIA..? "Sky" by Lashat · · Score: 2

    Will NVIDIA release a repsonse product or do they already have a "cloud" offering that is not announced?

    anyone...

    --
    For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
  3. Re:NVIDIA..? "Sky" by h4rr4r · · Score: 4, Informative

    They already announced it.
    It is called NVIDIA GRID.

  4. The 7990 is bigger than some motherboards. by RubberChainsaw · · Score: 3, Funny

    It finally happened, add-in graphics cards are bigger than the rest of the computer.

    --
    I welcome our new 99% overlords.
  5. But will it blend? by DigitAl56K · · Score: 2

    Seems Blender's Cycles renderer is still having problems with AMD GPUs, and I see the finger pointed in AMD's direction. It would be nice to have some more hardware choices, but NVIDIA seems to be the only options at this point in time.

    1. Re:But will it blend? by exomondo · · Score: 2

      Seems Blender's Cycles renderer is still having problems with AMD GPUs, and I see the finger pointed in AMD's direction.

      In what specifically? I have to support nV and AMD graphics cards and get a lot of eng samples from both and when writing to the standard i don't find AMD cards to be any more buggy.

  6. Speed Versus Reliability by CAOgdin · · Score: 2

    I wish ATI would focus more energy on making their product stable, reliable and unable to be corrupted from innocent programs on the same computer. Right now, ATI and Nvidia drive the industry, and they couldn't give a damn about the BSODs they create!

  7. Re:3 fans on the 7990 is stupid by Type44Q · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I know its just a reference design but putting three fans, even two fans, on a video card is stupid. In all likelyhood, that more than doubles the failure rate vs a single fan cooling setup...

    All other things being equal, sure. However, which do you think would be more reliable, three fans at X rpm or one fan at 3X rpm? :)

  8. Re:Eh. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Informative

    FUD

    The latest AMD CPUs are just as fast as icore5's for single tasking and can multitask for 50% of the cost. My phenomII is older, but has virtualization instructions and a hexcore architecture than can run VMWare Workstation smoothly where an icore5 would be all choppy and struggle.

    The ATI cards are very competitive and slashdot should mention the ATI 7790 which is only $150 and very competitive value wise for those who do not want to blow $700 for a new powersupply + 2 card slot mega card.

  9. It all depends on the driver... by Turmoyl · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just as has been the story with ATI (now AMD) for more than a decade, it simply does not matter what kind of hardware they produce if they can't write a driver that is solid enough for things like gaming and GPGPU. No one is going to be satisfied with buggy GL, screen tears, etc., and things like that wreak absolute havoc on GPGPU solutions.

    I have tried ATI cards several times over the years only to be repeatedly disappointed to the point of returning them. Returns are so common that Newegg, who does not easily take returns, does not bat an eyelash when it comes to accepting an ATI/AMD card back.

    Without me saying a word my GPGPU guys recently had me convert their lone ATI/AMD-based system over to Nvidia due to these long-running driver issues. Unless/until AMD can definitively demonstrate that they have broken this poor coding cycle, and will not allow it to occur again, I simply cannot and will not recommend their GPU products to anyone regardless of the specs, hype, or pretty boxes.