Anand talk R580

[kemosabe]

"I would venture that it makes little business sense actually. If r580 was able to be launched on tuesday then ATI should do so."

Assuming your part is competitive (X1800XT would fit that description vs. G70), it makes business sense to the extent that if you've ordered thousands of expensive R520 wafers weeks/months in advance, you're going to want to sell them at a decent profit (especially when you've just taken an inventory writedown and margins are suffering). Then again, if NVDA were to try to ambush ATI once again with a 90nm G7X holiday launch with immediate availability, then I agree it would be foolish to hold back on R580 (assuming it's ready to go) because those retail R520 sales/margins would get hammered anyway.

 

[Geo]

I cannot imagine, even with some process maturity of a few months, that there is any way that yields/margins for R580 can be as good as they are for R520. That must play into the thinking as well, so long as they are relatively comfortable with R520's competitive position vs NV's current high-end.

 

[kemosabe]

The fix for R580 will be the same as R520, and it probably won't many other potential issues will have already been known quantities as the quads are brought over from RV530

Would you mind going through that one sentence again, Dave?

 

[AlphaWolf]

Would you mind going through that one sentence again, Dave?

Fixing softground issue for r580 same as for r520.
Other potential issues should be limited as quads are same in r580 as rv530.

 

[kemosabe]

Thanks, that's what I thought he was saying - which all suggests that R580 could be on sale long before March if required.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

"I would venture that it makes little business sense actually. If r580 was able to be launched on tuesday then ATI should do so."

Assuming your part is competitive (X1800XT would fit that description vs. G70), it makes business sense to the extent that if you've ordered thousands of expensive R520 wafers weeks/months in advance, you're going to want to sell them at a decent profit (especially when you've just taken an inventory writedown and margins are suffering). Then again, if NVDA were to try to ambush ATI once again with a 90nm G7X holiday launch with immediate availability, then I agree it would be foolish to hold back on R580 (assuming it's ready to go) because those retail R520 sales/margins would get hammered anyway.

Look at the mindshare, sales and marketing Nvidia got out of getting G70 out a few months earlier and being perceived as blowing the doors off anything ATI could offer. It even made the R520 look so-so in comparison, even though it's a great chip. ATI was put on the back foot and Nvidia has been trading very well off their good and early execution of a next-gen product.

If ATI could do the same thing to Nvidia with R580 that Nivdia did to ATI with the G70, it could be worth the early release. Right now Nvidia seems to be the leader of the market again, with ATI reacting to them. An early R580 launch would change the market perception to ATI being ahead of the game, especially if Nvidia can't respond, even with a G70 Ultra.

 

[Geo]

R580 will be perceived to be a much better chip a few months from now. Look at what ATI by their own admission are learning about the MC on R520. Then add what they have yet to learn about optimizing for the RV530-type quads that R580 will feature. Then you add the lead time of scheduling production; XT is already cranking off the line, RV530 is up next. . .do you want to bump your bread and butter chip for R580 if NV isn't sticking it to you (and they aren't)? Plus the margins/yields issue above, and getting a few more months of process maturity experience. Memory prices are probably a bit more reasonable too further out --or faster; take your pick.

So what I get from Wavey is "they can if they want" on going earlier, but I can understand not wanting to do so absent a significant "new development".

 

[kemosabe]

Look at the mindshare, sales and marketing Nvidia got out of getting G70 out a few months earlier and being perceived as blowing the doors off anything ATI could offer. It even made the R520 look so-so in comparison, even though it's a great chip. ATI was put on the back foot and Nvidia has been trading very well off their good and early execution of a next-gen product.

It's not so much that NVDA got G70 out earlier, but ATI being very late. In fact I'm of the opinion that the G70 launch wouldn't necessarily have been immediate availability had R520 arrived as expected in June. With ATI's delay, it wasn't very complicated for NVDA to pick its day and proudly announce that the boards were already on the shelves. R520 would've looked far better in the spring than it does now, but you can't change the past. I'm thinking like geo that ATI will release R580 before 2006 only if they feel forced to do so.

 

[ANova]

If the r580 is the killer everyone seems to imagine then why not bring it out and let it mop up the gtx and rake in the profits?

If they launched the R580 now they would lose lots of profits on the R520 and have no answer to the G72.

The R520 is enough to compete against the G70 with roughly equal performance and more features.

 

[soylent]

The X1800XL improved on AA performance relative to the similarly-clocked X800XT.

And it has more granular and more programmable memory controller. And a bunch of other improvements on caching and stuff no doubt. I don't think you should expect this large improvements every generation, though I certainly would welcome it.

(Xenos takes an even much smaller hit from AA using eDRAM. But it ought to be rather awkward to make xenos and an x1800 like architecture pin compatible considering how different they are)

 

[Slyne]

Something else that hasn't been broached in this thread is that R580 (as far as I know) should be the last model before the R6xx series (I may be awfully wrong here). If one considers that DirectX 10 (call it whatever you want, name keeps changing) is necessary to fully exploit the capabilities of the 6xx series, then releasing R580 now would leave them more than a year without a new enthusiast part.

It's almost certain that Nvidia will release a new part (the 90nm enfhanced G70) in the meantime and, if it got the upper hand, R580 would suddenly look rushed. Better fix that speed bug, watch RV530 in action, and tweak R580 some more to have one last great DX9 part, released at the right moment.

Just my 2 cents

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Something else that hasn't been broached in this thread is that R580 (as far as I know) should be the last model before the R6xx series (I may be awfully wrong here). If one considers that DirectX 10 (call it whatever you want, name keeps changing) is necessary to fully exploit the capabilities of the 6xx series, then releasing R580 now would leave them more than a year without a new enthusiast part.

But the later ATI release R580, the less life it has before Windows Vista arrives and needs new graphics cards. If they wait for G72, they are seen as following on with an average product where Nvidia gets sales and kudos for being first with their refresh, just as they were with G70.

.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Something else that hasn't been broached in this thread is that R580 (as far as I know) should be the last model before the R6xx series (I may be awfully wrong here). If one considers that DirectX 10 (call it whatever you want, name keeps changing) is necessary to fully exploit the capabilities of the 6xx series, then releasing R580 now would leave them more than a year without a new enthusiast part.

It's almost certain that Nvidia will release a new part (the 90nm enfhanced G70) in the meantime and, if it got the upper hand, R580 would suddenly look rushed. Better fix that speed bug, watch RV530 in action, and tweak R580 some more to have one last great DX9 part, released at the right moment.

Just my 2 cents

I believe there is an R590.

 

[Ailuros]

Tell me that the refreshes of either/or R520/G70 will get away with less than 380M transistors at least and then I might agree that they can just magically pop out of any of the two IHVs sleeves that easily.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Tell me that the refreshes of either/or R520/G70 will get away with less than 380M transistors at least and then I might agree that they can just magically pop out of any of the two IHVs sleeves that easily.

ATI claims they already have R580 working and ready for production. It was on time where R520 was late.

 

[Ailuros]

ATI claims they already have R580 working and ready for production. It was on time where R520 was late.

I recall rather statements as in "in house and working" and that doesn't mean that it's ready for production even now. It rather means that it's in it's final stage of development.

 

[kemosabe]

I recall rather statements as in "in house and working" and that doesn't mean that it's ready for production even now. It rather means that it's in it's final stage of development.

A devil's advocate could argue that "in house and working" was exactly the same description used (on the same slide) for R520, RV530 and RV515, all of which are currently in production.

 

[chavvdarrr]

If all things go well, we'll see at least one version of Windows Vista RTM'ed (Release To Manufacturer, an OEM version) on July 25th, 2006

With Vista RTm at July 2006 there is no much time left.
Users will want DX10 hardware available ne later than July 24th,2006 (hell, i WANT the hardware NOW!)

Releasing R580 after Christmas will make its life very short - january, february are "slow-salers", and March/April is so close to July that many will prefer to wait and buy DX10 hardware.

 

[hkultala]

I would venture that it makes little business sense actually. If r580 was able to be launched on tuesday then ATI should do so.

The research for the r520 is a sunk cost, they have already spent the money and saying "we should delay the r580 so the r520 can recoup its developments costs" would be idiotic. If ATI does that then they will be paying the price for it at a later time.

If the r580 is the killer everyone seems to imagine then why not bring it out and let it mop up the gtx and rake in the profits?

they did paper lauch on X1800XT.

R580 is at last few months behing R520.
so they could paper lauch it on december, deliver at january - february.

but paper lauching it would only decrease their profits for R520.

Unless nvidia releases something earth-shattering,
what I see is reasonable for ATI is to start manufacturing R580 as early as possible, but stockpile the chips and then release the chip at february with good availability, flooding the market with new chips.

R580 is also somewhat "ahead of it's time". the later it is released/benchmarked, the better it does in benchmarks agains competing chips, as it's designed for games with heay shader usage and is not at all better than R520 when shaders are not the bottleneck,
and the later it's benchmarked, the bigger percentag of games used in the benchmarks are "shader-heavy" and use PS3 and dynamic branching.

remember R9700 lauch?
most reviews used games with almost no shaders, dual-texturing etc.
on initial benchmarks it was often on-par with GF4600 when AA was not used.
only later it could really show it's claws when games started to really use shaders, and totally wiped the floor not only with GF4600 but it's successor GF5800.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

R580 is also somewhat "ahead of it's time". the later it is released/benchmarked, the better it does in benchmarks agains competing chips, as it's designed for games with heay shader usage and is not at all better than R520 when shaders are not the bottleneck,
and the later it's benchmarked, the bigger percentag of games used in the benchmarks are "shader-heavy" and use PS3 and dynamic branching.

The later ATI launch it, the less chance R580 has of being seen to be impressive and grabbing mindshare and sales. Launch it today and it looks fantastic. Launch it in March when everyone is waiting for Vista hardware and Nvidia gets out G72 first, and it looks decidely average. Whether all that is true in fact is not so important as whether it is perceived to be the case.

Once again, look at how Nvidia took the wind out of R520 sails by launching (and shipping) G70 a few months earlier. If ATI don't want to be a victim of that again, they should get R580 out sooner rather than later.