What is the AMD/ATI Radeon 6000 series GPU architecture?

Question

See question. I can find documentation on the 5000 series and 7000 series but no real notes on 6000 series. This is useful for trying to get close to the theoretical maximum throughput with OpenCL.

So far I've found AMD's programming guide (pdf). This covers 5000 and 7000 series. But it only mentions 6000 series in passing.

Answer 1

My understanding of the 6000 series gpus is that they are very similar to the 5000s, except for the 69xx, which are closer to the 7000s.

The 69xx gpus (Cayman) use a VLIW4 instruction set, the 6870 and lower models in the series use the VLIW5 architecture found in the 5000 gpus.

I found more about this on the wiki:

Northern Islands

AMD Graphic cards comparison (Northern Islands)

Something else I have found useful is to google image search "amd X block diagram" where X is one of the following gpu code names: Cedar, Caicos, Turks, Juniper, Barts, Cayman, Antilles, etc.

Answer 2

If youa are looking specifically for Cayman(6950/6970) architecture (VLIW 4) then look at the http://www.realworldtech.com/cayman

HTH

Answer 3

The 6000s are basically the same as the 5000s. The only real significant difference is that Cayman is VLIW4 and the others in the series (e.g. Barts) are VLIW5 like the previous R600 architecture generations.