Quote from: GooberGoo on July 03, 2011, 08:01:29 AM

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1) SHA-2 capability has been removed from the upcoming 7xxx series, thus, won't help miners
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Can someone please verify that the AMD HD7000 Cards won't have the Int32 Right Rotate Operation (very useful for SHA-256).

I can't find it in any rumor about the upcoming HD7000 series.

http://www.hardwareboard.eu/topnews/geruchte-zur-radeon-hd-7000-serie-kommt-definitiv-noch-2011-in-28nm-update-8-release-monat-bekannt-379/

This homepage (german) says, that the upcoming HD7xxx chip will have 3200 Shader Cores and about 6.08 TFlop/s. But unless AMD releases official informations, we should be careful with this informations.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU
And finally in this wiki there is an explanation why ATI is better for mining than Nvidia. If the HD7000 really has 6,08 TFlops and does support INT32 Right Rotate, we will see about 750 MHash/s.

Why do i make this prediction?
Simply a not overclocked HD5850 has 250 MHash/s with about 2 TFlop/s. A GTX480 reaches 105 MHash/s with 1.4 TFlop/s. The INT32 RR Operation gives ATI an advantage of 1.9 for SHA-256 hashing. Together with the higher Peak Performance of the HD5850, the 5850 should be about 2.6x faster than a GTX480, which is nearly true.

I know the HD7000 cards will use a newer architecture similar to NVIDIA, but Mining performance seems to depend linear to the peak performance of a video card. The reason why ati cards are more efficient seems to be just the INT32 Right Rotate Operation, which can be performed in one operation on ATI cards, but needs 3 operations on Nvidia cards. So it's very important to know wether the HD7000 support this operation in order to predict the Hashrate.