[Geo]

Some history
The ATI R600 Rumours & Speculation Centrum
The (inappropriately named) LAST R600 Rumours & Speculation Thread
Huddy says R600
Xbit: This report is the standard for where "64 shaders" comes from.
B3D on 80nm.
B3D on 512-bit to external memory
B3D on Xenos heritage
Tech Report suggesting Dave Orton said "96 shaders" for R600. However, actual quote was "next generation", which might leave the door open that he was referring to a 65nm refresh rather than R600.
Roughly 6 pages of talking about reported claimed die shots starting at #674 here
Site claiming to have an R600 listing specs and "testing" results. Sober and considered opinion of B3D staff concerning the claimed specs: "Pttthhhppptt!"
DailyTech finding said site credible.
CJ's leaked specs discussing timeframes, prices and performance estimations on this very thread.
Henri Richard promises Q1 for R600 launch
AMD sets Tech Day for R600
Beyond3D and Xbit report R600 pushed to Q2.

Some spec and launch date information from the AMD 690G launch on 2/28/2007.

[Arty]

The interesting bits from that EETimes article:

• Separately, AMD gave one of the first public demos of the R600, its next-generation graphics controller that uses 320 multiply-accumulate units.
• The company showed a Barcelona-based system using two 200W R600 graphics cards to hit a terabit/second benchmark.
• AMD also demonstrated working versions of its next-generation graphics chip the R600 to be released by the end of June.
• Release of the R600 has been delayed "a few weeks" so that AMD can roll out a full suite of graphics chips covering multiple market segments for the latest Microsoft DirectX 10 applications programming interface.

[Farhan]

It's teraflop, not terabit

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/02...d_690g_launch/
http://www.informationweek.com/news/...=Breaking+News
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=363
http://content.zdnet.com/2346-10741_22-57089.html
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=364

http://www.boincstats.com/stats/host...sah&st=0&or=10 - zomg Barcelona?

[R300King!]

Why the new thread?

AMD gave one of the first public demos of the R600, its next-generation graphics controller that uses 320 multiply-accumulate units. The company showed a Barcelona-based system using two 200W R600 graphics cards to hit a terabit/second benchmark.

So doesn't this mean it's 320/2 = 160 units? If you divide the 160 by vec4 you get 40.

But not sure if any of this is even true.

[INKster]

Originally Posted by R300King!

So doesn't this mean it's 320/2 = 160 units? If you divide the 160 by vec4 you get 40.

But not sure if any of this is even true.

And if you multiply 40 by 2, you get 80.

[R300King!]

Originally Posted by INKster

And if you multiply 40 by 2, you get 80.

Yeah, I know. I mean a single R600 chip will only have 160 or 40 vec4. Maybe that board was with 2 mid-range R600s with few shaders than the XTX version. Who knows?



OT Have you seen Level505 recently, it's covered with ads. Way more than before. lol

[R300King!]

Also, that 1 Terabit(is that correct?)/sec processing power, does that include the CPUs?

The company showed a Barcelona-based system using two 200W R600 graphics cards to hit a terabit/second benchmark

[Jawed]

Aha, Barcelona/R600

Jawed

[Rangers]

Originally Posted by serenity

The interesting bits from that EETimes article:

• Separately, AMD gave one of the first public demos of the R600, its next-generation graphics controller that uses 320 multiply-accumulate units.
• The company showed a Barcelona-based system using two 200W R600 graphics cards to hit a terabit/second benchmark.
• AMD also demonstrated working versions of its next-generation graphics chip the R600 to be released by the end of June.
• Release of the R600 has been delayed "a few weeks" so that AMD can roll out a full suite of graphics chips covering multiple market segments for the latest Microsoft DirectX 10 applications programming interface.

So again, why the hell did they delay it?

I honestly cant believe it. It seems like ATI just did it to lose.

The whole thing about to introduce a whole "suite" is just stupid, as neither Nvidia nor anybody else does that. You go high end first.

[Natoma]

Originally Posted by Rangers

So again, why the hell did they delay it?

I honestly cant believe it. It seems like ATI just did it to lose.

The whole thing about to introduce a whole "suite" is just stupid, as neither Nvidia nor anybody else does that. You go high end first.

ATI doesn't exist anymore. It's AMD remember. That changes the approach significantly.

[nelg]

Perhaps AMD delayed the R600 to use the new family of Rx6XX cards to bolster the performance of Barcelona.

[Shtal]

Originally Posted by Rangers

So again, why the hell did they delay it?

I honestly cant believe it. It seems like ATI just did it to lose.

The whole thing about to introduce a whole "suite" is just stupid, as neither Nvidia nor anybody else does that. You go high end first.

Just my own thoughts about delay!

1st = Their is no solid DX10 driver for Vista. (Example like for G80)
2nd = Their is no DX10 Vista games.
3rd = Probably to surprise Nvidia since they don't know what they are up against, because they have to adjust GF8900GTX to match R600.
4th = Probably their is little or no profit at all for High-End, so they need midrange graphic cards to make up the cost in order for overall profit gain.
5th = Not many people will upgrade their video cards right away (Example like Geo with his GF8800GTX )

[Dave Baumann]

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070301/20070228006340.html?.v=1

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AMD (NYSE: AMD - News) today showcased a single-system, Accelerated Computing platform that breaks the teraflop computing barrier. Organizations are ultimately expected to be able to apply this technology to a wide range of scientific, medical, business and consumer computing applications. At a press event in San Francisco, AMD demonstrated a "Teraflop in a Box" system running a standard version of Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional that harnessed the power of AMD Opteron(TM) dual-core processor technology and two next-generation AMD R600 Stream Processors capable of performing more than 1 trillion floating-point calculations per second using a general "multiply-add" (MADD) calculation. This achievement represents a ten-fold performance increase over today's high-performance server platforms, which deliver approximately 100 billion calculations per second.

[turtle]

Hmm. Dual-core 'city' CPU was used at the event instead of QC eh? Hint of things to come?

Can you comment on if that mysterious Opteron that showed up on BOINC is of the same breed or a hoax? That article certainly lends credence to the possibility of it being real...

Also, just out of curiosity, what MHZ number would be needed to hit 512GFLOPS using Geo's guesstimate on ALUs? ~890 (going by Al's math)?

Going by at least 1TFlops though, Al's math (which I have no idea is correct) and assuming that Opteron was around 24-25Gflops (which might be slightly off) 975/2 = 487.5/64*9 = 846mhz.

That wouldn't quite be half a teraflop per card, but close.

I'mma guess it was running at 850mhz or greater.

[Evildeus]

Originally Posted by Dave Baumann

[url]Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional

Hmmmm...

Hopefully, we will have a good GPU in may

[Anarchist4000]

Originally Posted by Rangers

So again, why the hell did they delay it?

I honestly cant believe it. It seems like ATI just did it to lose.

The whole thing about to introduce a whole "suite" is just stupid, as neither Nvidia nor anybody else does that. You go high end first.

I'm still leaning towards the platform launch, not just the family launch. And nobody else does it because nobody else can. Nvidia last I checked doesn't make CPUs and Intel's discrete graphics market hasn't quite developed yet.

Originally Posted by Ailuros

Assuming my idiotic math above has any legs, they'd need roughly 870MHz to fully reach a hypothetical 500 GFLOP rate.

64*5*3*.8=768GFLOPs * 2 = 1.536TFLOPs

A R600 Crossfire should fairly effectively destroy the TFLOP barrier. Also consider this, with G80's missing MUL a single R600 has more than twice the theoretical FP power.


In regards to the scheduling what if they just didn't bother with making it perfectly efficient as ALUs seem somewhat cheap going by the R520->R580 example.

1+1 = 1+2 = 1+3 = 1+4

If it doesn't branch you can really pack em in there. If it does branch you could look at it like 2 scalars. I can't think of how you'd end up with any shaders that had a greater than 50% scalar:vector ratio. Save the complexity of the scheduling and just add more ALUs and clockspeed.

Originally Posted by Geo

What I want to see is if rwolf can make 320 ALUs and 500 mflops into something 2GHz-ish.

Simple... Inverted Clock Domains.

[overclocked]

If its Vec and Scalar units based could those be clocked differently with the vec slower and scalar faster?

[DemoCoder]

Originally Posted by Anarchist4000

64*5*3*.8=768GFLOPs * 2 = 1.536TFLOPs

Umm, where's this * 3 coming from? A MADD is 2 FLOPS, not 3. 64 * 5 * 2 * .8 = 512 GFLOPs is more like it.

Don't you think the press release would have said "1.5TFlops!" if your math was right?

A R600 Crossfire should fairly effectively destroy the TFLOP barrier. Also consider this, with G80's missing MUL a single R600 has more than twice the theoretical FP power.

Nope. A G80 with missing MUL = 518Gflops. Certainly, the G80 won't always be able to use the missing MUL every cycle, but neither will the R600 be able to use every SIMD slot of their VEC4 every cycle either unless it is a scalar design IMHO. The true efficiency will be hard to calculate for both, so comparing absolutely unrealistic peak rates is nonsense.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Rangers

The whole thing about to introduce a whole "suite" is just stupid, as neither Nvidia nor anybody else does that. You go high end first.

The major sales and major money come from the medium/low end. If you can launch these before added hype the high end generates fades away, then all the better. Provided the high end card does well, it can only have a positive effect on the lower end cards.

I was told geforce 8000 cards are fastest in the world... wait.. I can't afford it. Never mind.
or..
I was told radeon x2000 cards are the fastest in the world... awesome! they have one at my price point!

Lets hope if amd do release an entire platform in one hit top to bottom, they unify the naming schemes too... Like AMD X[series] [perf] [product]... AMD x2 300 graphics, AMD x2 400 cpu, AMD x2 200 platform,.. whatever. Something like that.

[Anarchist4000]

Well they've already got tons of X's in the names as well as an affinity for 4 digit numbers so does that count as unified? XL, XT, XTX, FX, X2, x64

But the entire platform launch does look rather appealing from a marketing perspective. Of course all the reviewers are gonna be mad because they get nailed with a massive workload all at once.

Originally Posted by Quasar

Under Vista i'm getting about 93% percent MADD-efficiency on G80. (~322 out of 346 GFLOPs/sec.)

I'm assuming you aren't using SLI though and how exactly was it measured out of curiosity?

[CarstenS]

Originally Posted by Anarchist4000

I'm assuming you aren't using SLI though and how exactly was it measured out of curiosity?

No, it was a single G80. Measured with official 100.65 Forceware, Vista x86 and v1.2.1 of GPUBench's "Scalar vs. Vektor Instruction Issue"-part.

On R580+ I am only getting close to 75 percent efficiency on MAD and only about 50 percent on ADD (Cat 7.1; curious note: Skalar-split does not seem to work anymore in 7.1 drivers but vec4-results are in line with older drivers).

[WaltC]

Originally Posted by Rangers

So again, why the hell did they delay it?

I honestly cant believe it. It seems like ATI just did it to lose.

The whole thing about to introduce a whole "suite" is just stupid, as neither Nvidia nor anybody else does that. You go high end first.

Yes, it's apparent that AMD(ATi) is "marching to a different drummer" and going about things in the way that suits it instead doing something cookie-cutter just like everybody else. What you might find strange about that I can't imagine. I think it's refreshing to see a little originality now and then. Really, market leaders and innovators don't spend their time copying what everybody else is doing because they are too busy forging a path of their own--and what usually happens is that after they embark on that path the cookie-cutter crowd falls all over itself trying to fall in line behind them (This sounds a bit cliche', I know, but there it is...)

Witness the sea change in nVidia's direction after the launch of R300, for instance. R300 went from being "the wrong direction for 3d gaming" according to nVidia press releases and interviews made in the year after the R300 launch, to being the essential platform blueprint for the design of nVidia's nV40. Then there's Intel, which went from ignoring the Athlon as though it did not exist, to pushing Prescott as an "Athlon killer" for an entire year or longer before Prescott launched-then-imploded, to an anti-64 bit desktop, Itanium-based PR campaign, all the way right up to the x86-64 Core 2--which is a lot more like the Athlon 64 in design than it is like Prescott, etc. And now that Barcelona is beginning to be unveiled ( http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...oc.aspx?i=2939 ), Intel is falling all over itself jabbering excitedly about its upcoming 45nm Core 2 production even at a time when the company is throwing everything it has got into ramping its 65nm Core 2 production capacities.

As to what you mean by "It seems like ATI just did it to lose" I'm afraid I haven't got the foggiest... Lose what, exactly? I mean, it's a little hard to "lose" before you get started, I think. Now, if after the company launches it looks like what they've launched isn't competitive with what the cookie-cutter crowd is doing right now, then we can revisit this issue and I'll probably agree with you. But at the moment it isn't clear to me that AMD/Ati has lost anything--yet. We'll know who is "winning" and "who is losing" in a few weeks, imo, with respect to R600.

[Geo]

Originally Posted by WaltC

Witness the sea change in nVidia's direction after the launch of R300, for instance. R300 went from being "the wrong direction for 3d gaming" according to nVidia press releases and interviews made in the year after the R300 launch, to being the essential platform blueprint for the design of nVidia's nV40.

While "essential platform blueprint" is a bit over the top, I think, it is true that a leading web site <kaff> said this at the launch of NV40:

Jen-Hsun’s comments at the start of the recent NVIDIA Editors Day suggested that they had taken onboard the principals that ATI set forth with R300 of going for a very parallel architecture. As you look beyond the wide pipelined nature of NV40 and begin to look at little more at the pixel shader composition and the various quality options available you begin to see that this is not all NVIDIA have adopted. NV40 is not a particularly revolutionary architecture, but very evolutionary from many of the principals ATI delivered on some 20 months ago, combined with some of the better elements of NVIDIA’s previous architectures.

But that was then, and it might be time to let go of R300 vs NV30, for both sides. I mean, really. . .4.5 years isn't just a long time in the graphics world, it's ancient. And while we shouldn't forget history, neither should we overly fixate on one point over others.

[trinibwoy]

Originally Posted by WaltC

As to what you mean by "It seems like ATI just did it to lose" I'm afraid I haven't got the foggiest... Lose what, exactly? I mean, it's a little hard to "lose" before you get started, I think. Now, if after the company launches it looks like what they've launched isn't competitive with what the cookie-cutter crowd is doing right now, then we can revisit this issue and I'll probably agree with you. But at the moment it isn't clear to me that AMD/Ati has lost anything--yet. We'll know who is "winning" and "who is losing" in a few weeks, imo, with respect to R600.

Heh, Walt only you could twist a delayed product announcement by ATi into an innovative breath of fresh air. So shipping and selling products on time is now "cookie-cutter"? You're the breath of fresh air man - just made my day

This isn't a game where you fight only when you know you can win - how is R600 launching six months after G80 going to be any kind of victory? But alas, R600 could launch in 2009 and you'll still think it's the best strategic move ever!

[trinibwoy]

So are we sold on AMD delaying R600 intentionally just so it can launch with Barcelona? I have a really hard time grasping the strategic and economic advantages of such a move - can someone smarter than me help me out here?

I could guess that they're banking on stalling the market somewhat since they know a lot of people are waiting for R600. Now it would only make sense to do that if they were banking on these same people picking up a CPU while they're at it. Yet we have no word on the desktop variants so that plan sounds doubtful.

I would really like seeing some points on this that don't distill down to "it will be cool to launch all the cards together".