OCZ Octane 1.13 Firmware Update: Improving 4KB Random Write Performance

The one thing that OCZ has been missing for so many years is finally one of its staples: focus. The same company that dabbled in everything from brain mice to DIY notebooks is now almost exclusively an SSD company that peddles power supplies on the side. OCZ's penchant for aggressively trying new things hasn't faded away however. As an SSD maker, OCZ is currently or will in the near future, be shipping drives based on controllers from three different vendors - each with their own strengths. OCZ's relationship with SandForce continues and the Vertex 3 remains OCZ's highest performing offering. A recent partnership with Marvell gives OCZ early experience with native PCIe based SSDs, experience that is extremely important as the industry marches towards a new PCIe based interface standard for SSDs (SATA Express). Finally there's OCZ's own controller, the Indilinx Everest, which it is quickly building momentum behind. It's obviously in OCZ's best interests to have its own controllers in the bulk of the drives it makes, but one doesn't simply build a better controller than everyone else on the first try.

A few weeks ago OCZ released a firmware update for its Octane drives that promised a significant increase in 4KB random write performance. Read on for our analysis of the firmware update!

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Update: AMD Quietly Releases The OEM-Only Radeon HD 7000 Series: VLIW5 Rides Again

Earlier today one of our news editors, Andrew Cunningham, came to me with an interesting problem. HP was launching their gaming-oriented Phoenix desktop, and the spec sheet listed a video card he had never seen before: the Radeon HD 7670. Initially thinking it was a typo on HP’s part we did some digging, and after finding a well-hidden product page we had our answer. It’s Turks.

 AMD Radeon HD 7670AMD Radeon HD 6670Stream Processors480480Texture Units2424ROPs88Core Clock800MHz800MHzMemory Clock1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR51GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5Memory Bus Width128-bit128-bitVRAM512MB/1GB1GBFP64N/AN/ATransistor CountN/A716MTDPN/A66WArchitectureVLIW5VLIW5Manufacturing ProcessN/ATSMC 40nm

There are days I’d like to think that it’s the OEM market that’s the oddball, but the truth of the matter is that it’s the retail discrete market that’s the oddball. The OEM market – mobile and discrete – is in fact the norm, as OEM video card sales absolutely dwarf retail discrete video card sales. So much of what we take for granted with retail cards – well defined specifications and formal product announcements through press releases – simply don’t happen in the OEM market. Instead the OEM market is ambiguous on its best days and secretive at its worst, and as a result OEM-only products rarely get a formal announcement, and you would never know about some products if not for the fact that OEMs list them in their system specifications like HP did in this case. Ultimately because of the ambiguity in the OEM market and the need to push specifications, some of the most ridiculous video cards are launched here.

Technically speaking AMD already diluted the 7000 series last month with the launch of the 7000M series, which saw Turks’ and Caicos’ mobile counterparts reborn as various 7000M products. However as the OEM desktop is usually at least slightly saner than the mobile market we had some hope that the 7000M rebrand wouldn’t catch up to the desktop market, but this was not to be. It typically takes AMD around 6 months to launch a complete product stack so a Turks-like GCN product would be a spring/summer affair, but OEMs don’t want to wait that long, especially with CES right around the corner.

The problem of course with a Turks-based 7000 series product is that there just aren’t a lot of similarities to the other 7000 series products to speak of. Turks and Tahiti (and Cape Verde and Pitcairn) are distinctly different products from a feature set perspective. Southern Islands was the biggest GPU architectural overhaul for AMD in the last 5 years, creating a massive divide between Turks and Southern Islands.

The following is a list of some the important attributes and major features being introduced with Southern Islands. None of which will be available with the Turks based 7670.

TSMC’s 28nm HKMG processGraphics Core Next architecturePCI-Express 3.0Direct3D 11.1Partially Resident TexturingFast HDMIVideo Codec Engine (fixed function H.264 encoder)DDM AudioZeroCore PowerAnisotropic Filtering Quality Improvements

As it stands Turks is still a fine GPU, but when badged as the 7670 this insane namespace collision makes it very hard to meaningfully differentiate between products. Do you want fast H.264 encoding and Direct3D 11.1 support? Then you want a Radeon HD 7000 series card, but now you have to make sure it’s not a 7670. Turks simply doesn't have enough in common with Southern Islands to justify this kind of a model number. Ultimately the launch of the 7670 brings with it the same problem that most other rebrands do, albeit on a larger scale: it's being sold on the well-earned strength of the 7000 series name but lacks the 7000 series' features.

Long term there will also be the question of whether we'll see the 7670 Turks in the retail market. OEM products sometimes cross over - the 6770 being the most recent example - so the 7670 may not stay OEM-only forever.

Update 01/06/2012: The crew over at Tom’s Hardware found AMD’s complete OEM video card page; the 7670 wasn't alone.

The Turks based 6570 is back as the 7570. The Caicos based 6450 is back as the 7470 and the 7450 (depending on the type of RAM used). And absurdly enough, the 2 year old Cedar based 5450 is back as the 7350. The last one is particularly notable as Cedar is from the Evergreen family, not Northern Islands. So it lacks all the features Northern Islands brought, including DisplayPort 1.2 support, improved anisotropic filtering, UVD3, MLAA, and the improved tessellation unit; all of this being on top of all of the differences between Northern Islands and Southern Islands.

 AMD Radeon HD 7570AMD Radeon HD 7470AMD Radeon HD 7450AMD Radeon HD 7350Stream Processors48016016080Texture Units24888ROPs8444Core Clock650MHz750MHz625MHz400-650MHzMemory Clock1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5900MHz (3.6GHz data rate) GDDR5800MHz (1.6GHz data rate) DDR3800MHz DDR3/ 400MHz DDR2Memory Bus Width128-bit64-bit64-bit64-bitVRAM512MB/1GB512MB/1GB512MB/1GBN/ATransistor Count716M370M370M292MManufacturing ProcessTSMC 40nmTSMC 40nmTSMC 40nmTSMC 40nmArchitectureVLIW5 (Turks)VLIW5 (Caicos)VLIW5 (Caicos)VLIW5 (Cedar)

Meanwhile AMD’s web team appears to have made some mistakes listing specifications, which makes the 7000 series ambiguity even worse. The 7470 and 7570 are listed as having “Video Compression Engine (VCE)” support as a feature. As you may recall, SI introduced the Video Codec Engine (VCE), which is AMD’s fixed function encoder. Turks and Caicos of course have the same shader-based video encoding functionality as the rest of the 6000 and 5000 series, but they do not have a fixed function encoder, so we’re not sure how that ended up there. It’s worth noting that AMD had a similar problem with the 7970, which when initially published touted support for DX10 Super Sample Anti-Aliasing.

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Update: AMD Re-Releases Catalyst Preview Driver For Rage

With the release of id Software's Rage this morning, AMD has pushed out a new preview driver specifically for the game. Unlike last week's 11.10 preview driver, AMD has not assigned a version number to this driver as it's based on an earlier fork than 11.10, making it both newer and older than the 11.10 preview. As a result AMD is reccomending users only install this driver for playing Rage, and stick to 11.10 otherwise.

Update: AMD apparently posted the wrong driver the first time around. The Catalyst preview for Rage has been re-released with the correct driver

Source: AMD

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The Brazos Update: AMD's E-450

At Computex there are a few systems floating around with an updated version of AMD's Brazos platform. The E-350 we reviewed not too long ago featured two Bobcat cores running at 1.6GHz alongside an 80 SP GPU running at 400MHz. Later this year AMD will refresh the platform with an E-450. You'll still get the same 2/80 core configuration, but clock speeds and memory support will be slightly different.

The E-450 runs at 1.65GHz, a mild increase over the E-350. Remember that AMD used a very GPU-like approach to the design of Bobcat. The chip was very easy to lay out and manufacture, but it doesn't have the frequency headroom of a traditional AMD CPU. Instead AMD will have to rely on process shrinks to really bring about larger increases in clock speed. AMD will also add DDR3-1600 support with the E-450, a mild spec bump over the 1333MHz support we get today.

While the GPU doesn't get any more execution power it will both operate at a higher base frequency and apparently support some form of graphics turbo. Manufacturers at the show tell us that the CPU side won't be able to turbo up. The E-450 is still a few months away from release, we'll see AMD's Llano followed by Bulldozer before Brazos gets this mid-cycle update.]]>

The Brazos Update: AMD's E-450

At Computex there are a few systems floating around with an updated version of AMD's Brazos platform. The E-350 we reviewed not too long ago featured two Bobcat cores running at 1.6GHz alongside an 80 SP GPU running at 400MHz. Later this year AMD will refresh the platform with an E-450. You'll still get the same 2/80 core configuration, but clock speeds and memory support will be slightly different.

The E-450 runs at 1.65GHz, a mild increase over the E-350. Remember that AMD used a very GPU-like approach to the design of Bobcat. The chip was very easy to lay out and manufacture, but it doesn't have the frequency headroom of a traditional AMD CPU. Instead AMD will have to rely on process shrinks to really bring about larger increases in clock speed. AMD will also add DDR3-1600 support with the E-450, a mild spec bump over the 1333MHz support we get today.

While the GPU doesn't get any more execution power it will both operate at a higher base frequency and apparently support some form of graphics turbo. Manufacturers at the show tell us that the CPU side won't be able to turbo up. The E-450 is still a few months away from release, we'll see AMD's Llano followed by Bulldozer before Brazos gets this mid-cycle update.]]>