Recent content by Mart

Perhaps it's out there allready, but no one's taken the cooler of to find out. Didn't Jen-Hsun Huang say something like that, that they had been making 55nm chips for a while now?

Microsoft is really in a unique position here. It has lots and lots of experience in the software department, giving it a huge advantage when it comes to tools, software, drivers, APIs, etc. It also has more than enough experience with hardware, it has worldwide networks for advertising...

No insults intended, I was just trying to say that while a lot of people use the term "shaders" for the hardware logic, it is not the correct name. The problem seems to be that a lot of people without 3D graphics knowledge do not seem to know that and still use the name, thus giving the wrong...

As far as I know, only people without 3D graphics knowledge call the actual hardware shaderprocessors/SPs/ALUs "shaders". It's a bit like calling the CPU "code". But someone please correct me if I'm wrong here...

If AMD is taking the time for an expensive modified version of RV770 without the need of a bridge chip, as some people here suggest, why wouldn't they just create an MCM? Just connect the busses from the two GPUs and make them work like one. No problems with the number of pins or bandwidth, no...

Thanks, I was getting affraid I was missing some fundamental part of R600 design. ;) Just out of curiosity, how big would a die need to be for 512bit? Does that depend on the process used, or is that always the same? And is there some rough (linear) equation to check how big the bus can be for...

Could you please explain a bit about the "4 Vec16 ALUs"? I only discovered a few months ago that R600 wasn't 320SPs but just 4 SIMD arrays with 16 5D ALUs each, but now you're saying it's not even that. Or is each ALU in your "Vec16" one of these 5D ALU's? If so, how does this work? :???:

Well, that bolded part is what I was after. Why use a big, expensive, mid-range chip and cut it down when it's not necessary? That's why you've got low-end chips which are a lot smaller and cheaper to produce. Cutting down part of a perfectly functioning chip wouldn't seem like a sound decision...

I don't really see the advantage of this. Perhaps if yields are really bad this could be useful, but why artificially limit the profit you get from a product when the price of making it is the same?

Thanks Arun, that really cleared things up for me :) Point taken, thanks for clarifying!

Oh sure, Intel has the resources for an exhaustion war, but they will still need to create a decent product for that. Intel could be pumping billions of dollars for ten years into the project, but if they don't create a product that has value, they will never sell anything. (And in that case...

This news got me a bit confused. Would anybody be so kind to explain the difference between power saving and performance increase? From what I've always learned, chips do wonderfull things, use power to do it, and generate heat by doing so. The chip can be clocked at a certain speed, but if you...

Sure, Intel has an option to fall back onto, but I don't see why that's such a big deal. NVIDIA's future depends on wether it stays ahead of Intel, but the same goes when you replace Intel with ATI (even if you left AMD out of the equation). That's the thing about having only one main market...

Tom's blog goes a bit further than just running multiple applications at the same time. Specifically: To me, this doesn't sound like just running other apps alongside your old well known pipeline, it sounds like using the flexibility of x86 (to a certain extent) within the pipeline. If true...

Oops, for some reason I thought it would be 2100MHz effective :roll: Still, 9800GTX has half that bandwidth, and seems to be limited on that front (The 9600GT, with only half the SPs, performs really well compared with it) Wouldn't it be a mistake if NVIDIA were to (nearly) double the amount...