Another Anand tease...

When I read the first message, my immediate thought was on AMD with their HAMMER cpu.

I hope it isn't a video card they're talking about. If it is, I'd love for it to be from one of the underdogs (PVR, VIA, BitBoys).

--|BRiT|

 

I think it's pretty obvious anand is talking about NV30. R300 performance is already known, and his reference to us not being able to see the results for a while yet indicate a chip that is not quite production ready.

I think what we can take back from this is that NV30 first spin is working well enough for nVidia to have the confidence to bring it in for testing. The real question is how close to target frequencies are they on this spin and does this mean they can pull in their schedule to ramp up in early fall? Bad news for ATI, great news for nVidia.

 

where is anand located? how far is this from a AMD/NVidia/PVR office?

 

NadTech is on the east coast somewhere, I want to say Maryland or NC or something, which IIRC is pretty close to Epic but of course damn far from AMD and nVidia headquarters in Silicon Valley.

 

Virginia, near DC, I believe.

 

Which development team is working on R400, East or West? And which development team has the ArtX people on it?

To spread further rumors, it looks like NV40 is goin to be a "big one" as well. According to roadmaps, NV40 won't be released for 1.5-2yrs after NV30. Of course, we are just getting ahead of ourselves now.

BTW, ATI is located in Toronto, IIRC. They're Canadians!

 

I ran a little tracert, and it looks like Anand is running through Stargate.net as their ISP, which is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

 

His server location is Pennsylvania...But Anand, himself, is located in Raleigh, N.C. I know because I moved from Raleigh 2 years ago, and he's now attending my alma mater.

Come to think of it...nVidia does have an office in Raleigh...hmmm...

 

technically, it could be Bitboys, but practically it can't be.

(or if it turns out be BB's card, then I am really suprised.)

 

I agree with this. It seems unlikely to me that Nvidia would travel all the way down to Anandtech to show off their new hardware. They already know they are the best, they don't have anything to prove (or so they think, at least). I've never heard of Nvidia flying out to show anyone anything, and I seriously doubt they care enough about Anand to rush down and show him a review board which would be under NDA anyway. Sounds more like ATi to me.

 

It is my educated guess that it cannot be NV30. While the R300 seems plausible given the recent various web links proclaiming 3DMark scores, my feeling is that it may not be the R300 as well.

I honestly have no idea what it may be really (nor do I care!)... the only important guess I can make is that Anand may finally have gone out dating girls (and even have a girlfriend!) based on his recent knack for offerring teasers.

 

That would make Benjamin quite a womanizer then

 

I would probably opt for an alpha NV30 on .13u. With the R300 about to launch and all the rumours of delays for the NV30 they are, IMHO, probably starting to get worried about losing market share and developer confidence. If they've got alpha silicon to show developers and reviewers that their product is going to be a serious piece of kit and worth the wait then they'll do it. Just to try and retain some control they may feel will be eroded by the R300 launch, especially as it seems it will have a lengthy run in the market before the NV30 shows up.

Mind you now that TMSC are, allegedly, working on a .09u processes and the 900Mhz-1Ghz DDR SGRAM is now available, the rumours of the .13u process hiccups may be slightly exaggerated (or at least have been ironed out now).

 

Cheap trick to get more hits

 

The idea of an AMD Hammer definitely crossed my mind too, the article being a CPU scaling shootout and all, it's possible he was refering to that instead of a new GPU. If it's a GPU after all I stick with my either PwerVR or Nvidia logic I expained earlier...

 

Problem is, can you see Epic being that excited about a CPU ?

 

R400 dev is based in Toronto at this time, that's all I know. The ex-ArtX people are spread out everywhere (or gone completely). You have to remember that a lot of people that work in R&D have only short-term employment. The teams consists of mainly "old masters" who oversee bunches of undergrads/postgrads that often bounce backwards and forwards between several companies. Even nV****.

By "Big One", I mean that it's the chip that ATi think will establish them as true market leaders. They are well on their way with R300, but the really big strides have been made in the AIB/ODM field; their penetration has been excellent, mainly due to the fact that the parts currently cost about 25% less to manufacture that rival companies' (mentioning no names). I believe they are currently looking for a design win with MSI; if they succeed, I'm sure we'll see Asus, Abit etc follow-suit.

Dude, if I wanted to spread rumours I'd make them much more interesting than this mundane crap.

MuFu.

 

And why should they be excited by a video card?

--|BRiT|

 

Hehe, good question.

Epic being a small company primarily developing and licensing a high-end 3D Engine (that is currently more and more moving towards GPU instead of CPU dependence for performance), I can actually picture them getting more excited about a new video card than about a new CPU. Still, I think getting hands on Hammer would also be quite interesting for them, if just for the kicks of seing what one possible future of PC processors will handle like...

Ah heck, we won't know what it is for months, quite annoying actually.

 

Anyone saw the pic on Nvnews? Seems to me we have our answer.

PSut the pic under the thread on NV30 on the news forum
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1556