ATI has had R500 silicone since November? (Anandtech)

[Acert93]

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2420&p=6

ATI has had Xbox 360 GPU silicon back since last November, so we tend to believe them.

If this is the case, why in the world has it not been made available, in some form, to developers? Giving them the benefit of the doubt it was the end of November, that is over 5 months now.

Something is screwy with that picture. RSX is expected to tape out before the end of 2005; until then Nvidia has supplied 6800U SLI SM 3.0 hardware.

MS devs if stuck with ATI cards are stuck with SM 2.0 cards that do not have UMAs or eDRAM. You would think that either 1. they would have hurried to get this new hardware to devs since it was done in November or 2. if they were gonna take their sweet time they would have worked on the chip some more.

This explains the state of affairs of the games to a degree, but it is hard to believe. I know getting a chip out is hard and cannot happen at the snap of the fingers, but if devs wont have working boxes until July and are stuck with the X800/X850 cards until July, that is a long time to have that new HOT hardware sitting around.

Confused.

 

[Geeforcer]

I can see why ATI would have problems with R520 silicone - it would keep smearing all over the PCB and shorting out the system.

Jokes aside, I think "having a working silicon" and "having enough working chips running at a decent speed" are two different things.

 

[AlNom]

Sure they could have had the GPU...but they're going to need to stick those onto a motherboard somehow... (Just a guess )