ATi's GPU development cycle

S

Sound_Card

Regular
Oh the pain in this title.


I can't help but ponder the thought of the growing concern of ATi's GPU devlopment cycle. R420 was slightly behind the Geforce 6 series, but the R520 was a good 3 months late behind the 7800GTX, and now R600 is 6 months late and counting behind G80. What exactly is going on? Can we blame management? Engineering? Both?!

I wonder if R600's long devlopment time is effecting and diverting resouces from R700. The pattern is getting very nasty, and it's really starting to show it's ugly side.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I hope they correct this quickly for the next-gen launches (this fall or next spring). They need to launch it within 2 months of when Nvidia launches.

As a hardware enthusiast, this R600 launch has turned into a major fiasco. I should have jumped onto the 8800-GTX months ago, but it seemed as if ATI's R600 would be available in just one month. It's like the classic line of "Two Weeks" when asked when it'll be done.
 
How many times has ATi beaten NVIDIA to market over the past 10 years?

It seems like the answer to this is once. Albeit that one time was compounded by a late and BAD architecture from NVIDIA.

That makes me think that NVIDIA has certain advantages that enable to continue this trend, rather than what's wrong with ATI.

So a better question I think, is what advantages do NVIDIA have and is it possible for ATi to catch up.

I am not sure why people are always asking what's wrong with a particular company rather than what's right with another.
 
I'm still wondering if we aren't looking at a once per year release schedule starting to be implemented. Assuming certain aspects of the GPU are going to be used in conjunction with Fusion I wouldn't be surprised if the GPUs are moving towards less releases with more fine tuning per release. Go through and hand optimize a large percentage of the chip and count on it lasting longer.

Another reason this might be occurring is that with HD becoming mainstream it might start becoming unreasonable for a video card to be pushing greater than a 1080P resolution. If the HDMI connector is any indication of what AMD is hoping to have hooked up to the R600 series this doesn't seem like an unreasonable idea.

Also with all chips effectively becoming unified I would imagine there are less things to actually work on optimize. You're looking at a small chunk of a chip x 64 for example. Hand tune one ALU and you effectively tuned all of the processing on a chip. And once you have an ALU setup working at >90% efficiency most of the time there shouldn't be a whole lot more efficiency to be gained.
 
From a noobs standpoint, it looks like Intel an Nv is killing Amd/Ati right now, and there is nothing they can do right now.......
 
Robin B said:
From a noobs standpoint, it looks like Intel an Nv is killing Amd/Ati right now, and there is nothing they can do right now.......
Click to expand...

please look up your info before u post anything next time. AMD (and ATI) are in a bad position right now for many reasons, but that doesn't mean that Intel and nvidia are killing them. ATI's GPU market share has in fact grown in Q4 2006 and remained the same in Q1 2007, as for AMD, they have been losing marketshare in the desktop and 2 way server market segments, but they have been gaining share in HPC and 4 way servers.

For your information, Dell are now buying lots of ATI HD 2400 GPUs, which is fantastic.
 
Sound_Card said:
I'm can't help but ponder the thought of the growing concern of ATi's GPU devlopment cycle. R420 was slightly behind the Geforce 6 series, but the R520 was a good 3 months late behind the 7800GTX, and now R600 is 6 months late and counting behind G80. What exactly is going on?
Click to expand...
Then again, R580 was on time, and there are rumours that R650 is on time too.
 
its not a generation difference but there were quite a bit of modifications for the r580 I'm sure, the memory controller for one had to be able to take GDDR4, large cache for the increased number of ALU's most likely, not sure if the r520 GPU was capable of GDDR4 or the original r580 was either, but the r580+ did need those changes.
 
Techno+ said:
please look up your info before u post anything next time. AMD (and ATI) are in a bad position right now for many reasons, but that doesn't mean that Intel and nvidia are killing them. ATI's GPU market share has in fact grown in Q4 2006 and remained the same in Q1 2007, as for AMD, they have been losing marketshare in the desktop and 2 way server market segments, but they have been gaining share in HPC and 4 way servers.

For your information, Dell are now buying lots of ATI HD 2400 GPUs, which is fantastic.
Click to expand...

I think a better argument from your standpoint is to show evidence of ATI's success through financial reports relating to discrete graphics chip sales as opposed to the market share statements. Market share numbers can be misleading and don't account for profitability.
 
Techno+ said:
please look up your info before u post anything next time. AMD (and ATI) are in a bad position right now for many reasons, but that doesn't mean that Intel and nvidia are killing them. ATI's GPU market share has in fact grown in Q4 2006 and remained the same in Q1 2007, as for AMD, they have been losing marketshare in the desktop and 2 way server market segments, but they have been gaining share in HPC and 4 way servers.

For your information, Dell are now buying lots of ATI HD 2400 GPUs, which is fantastic.
Click to expand...


I was also not aware that Jon Peddie had release his Q1 2007 graphics report. Have a link?
 
"R420 was slightly behind the Geforce 6 series, but the R520 was a good 3 months late behind the 7800GTX, and now R600 is 6 months late and counting behind G80"

Maybe they are applying moore's law on being late.

I hope r6xx's are good.
 
Sound_Card said:
Yes but how much of a difference in arc are R520 and R580?
Click to expand...
That doesn't matter. ATI didn't complete R520 and then start work on R580 afterwards. The whole reason why they came out within a couple of months of each other is that they were developed by two largely independent engineering teams. The R520 team hit delay after delay, while the R580 team didn't. So it's not as simple as "ATI's cycle is delayed". Some of their cycles are, and some aren't. There's even a hint of a pattern of the new-generation hardware being delayed while the speed-bump refresh isn't.
 
Sound_Card said:
Oh the pain in this title.


I can't help but ponder the thought of the growing concern of ATi's GPU devlopment cycle. R420 was slightly behind the Geforce 6 series
Click to expand...

Actually R420 beat NV40 to the market. The X800 Pro made it to stores about a month earlier than the 6800. ATi top end card of that generation X800 XT PE was a paper launch, though the same could be said for the 6800 Ultra when it was initially launched.

However, for the record X800 Pro (which used the R420 Core), beat out the GeForce 6 series to stores. What ATi did wrong was they crippled the X800 Pro too much, they crippled it to 12 pipes and lower clockspeed (it turned out that most could be unlocked with a simple bios flash, most just could make it up to XT PE clockspeeds with pipelines unlocked, most were fine with all 16 pipelines activated and X800 Pro clockspeeds though). Anyways ATi's X800 Pro was crippled a bit too much which nVidia on the other hand released the 6800 GT which had all the pipes unlocked but just wasn't clocked as high. Thus nVidia took a bit less slack for the lack of 6800 Ultra availability because they had the 6800 GT which was a better performer than a crippled X800 Pro.

But officially for the record R420 beat NV40 to the market.
 
Particleman said:
Actually R420 beat NV40 to the market. The X800 Pro made it to stores about a month earlier than the 6800. ATi top end card of that generation X800 XT PE was a paper launch, though the same could be said for the 6800 Ultra when it was initially launched.

However, for the record X800 Pro (which used the R420 Core), beat out the GeForce 6 series to stores. What ATi did wrong was they crippled the X800 Pro too much, they crippled it to 12 pipes and lower clockspeed (it turned out that most could be unlocked with a simple bios flash, most just could make it up to XT PE clockspeeds with pipelines unlocked, most were fine with all 16 pipelines activated and X800 Pro clockspeeds though). Anyways ATi's X800 Pro was crippled a bit too much which nVidia on the other hand released the 6800 GT which had all the pipes unlocked but just wasn't clocked as high. Thus nVidia took a bit less slack for the lack of 6800 Ultra availability because they had the 6800 GT which was a better performer than a crippled X800 Pro.

But officially for the record R420 beat NV40 to the market.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the history lesson.:p




That doesn't matter. ATI didn't complete R520 and then start work on R580 afterwards. The whole reason why they came out within a couple of months of each other is that they were developed by two largely independent engineering teams. The R520 team hit delay after delay, while the R580 team didn't. So it's not as simple as "ATI's cycle is delayed". Some of their cycles are, and some aren't. There's even a hint of a pattern of the new-generation hardware being delayed while the speed-bump refresh isn't.
Click to expand...


thanks for clarifying for me. So would that mean that their is a different design team for R700?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

G
ATI 4QF05 Conference Call
2
Replies
27
Views
5K
Geo
G
Back
Top