What is Fast14?

[Joe DeFuria]

What I would like to know is how far from mainly using standard fab cells in the logic parts of the current chips ( so IE lets forget about the mem/ramdac/agp ect ) because if there is currently a heavy amount of hand tuning then FAST14 probably isn't going to have a very profound effect.

...if not with absolute performance, but then certainly for cost / time to market.

The way I understand it, FAST14 is basically taking the "hand" out of "hand tuning."

 

[Basic]

Chalnoth:
Aivansama is right. Asynchronous processing is a completely different thing. In fact, this is about as far from asynchrounous you can go.

 

[bloodbob]

...if not with absolute performance, but then certainly for cost / time to market.

The way I understand it, FAST14 is basically taking the "hand" out of "hand tuning."

Not really there is still a lot of verification/testing ect to be done the proccess still takes a very long time but what it does do is it puts engineer's jobs on the line ( either that or free them up to work on other projects ). Though that will drop the price and make it cheaper for me .

 

[Pete]

The Inq has posted an interesting letter suggesting why ATi has teamed up with Intrinsity and MS with IBM. It seems both Intrinsity and IBM are quite familiar with PowerPC.

 

[rwolf]

I am betting that the connection is MIPS not PowerPC. ATI has a MIPS IP license and I bet they use functional units such as FPUs from MIPS in the R3xx. Fast-14 has high speed MIPS math logic so ATI can easily integrate it into their products.