Huddy says "R600"

I personally don't judge a GPU by it's theoretical peak numbers, buswidth or bandwidth but it's overall efficiency in the end. At this point without having detailed insider knowledge from both sides it's for me fairly impossible to judge any of the two products let alone make any safe predictions.

If the 86.4GB/sec are true, it translates into a ~69% more bandwidth then on the 7900GTX. I haven't yet understood how they reached that claimed 38.4 GPixels fillrate, have you? With as many unknown factors I'm a tad puzzled how you're able to determine what is low and what would be high.

I won't say that it's impossible that ATI might have gone for a 512bit bus, but I'd prefer to have a few more serious indications then random rumours that float around; likewise as the supposed 8 quads on R5x0 prior to it's initial launch. I'm still looking for the other half.

 

I think its fair knowledge that R580 costs almost twice than that of G71, atleast at launch. The idea of ATI fighting Nvidia on that front is plausible but that is not enough to make the 512bit thingy any more believable.

 

Fuad is also supporting the idea of the 512-bit memory interface:

The Inquirer

 

Fuad joins the 512bit bandwagon....

R600 has an external 512 memory bus
http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=35062

 

*does the free AA and filtering dance*

 

Keep on dancing..and dreaming..

 

oh i will buddy! i will!

 

Who knows...maybe ATi felt that margins were too high with R580 so they decided to completely destroy them with R600 The Inq mentions PCB complexity - will AIBs revolt if this thing really has a 512-bit external memory interface?

 

AIBs buy ready-built boards don't they? They just specify which combination of parts should be on board (memory quantity, VIVO, output port config, cooler etc.) and put their sticker on.

Jawed

 

Anyway, it seems that futzing around with 80nm (i.e. delays getting it out the door) are going to cost far more margin than the yield of the die or board complexity.

When stuff is late it completely screws-up your inventory as you have to make extra old stuff, which the fickle marketplace no longer wants to buy because of price/performance/features.

I'm still agog at the on-going 80nm delay. It truly is farcical that RV560/RV570 are hitting the market one year after R5xx debuted.

Jawed

 

I wonder if this will recreate the R300 situation? A stunning engineering design with people wondering how and why they did what they did to give us a great product that seemed to be way ahead of it's time. I remember everyone going at R300, and I have a suspicion that R600 could be the same.

Before someone else says it though, I'm not suggesting that G80 is going to be NV30. I think G80 could be a great chip. I just think that R600 will be .

 

If one GPU really does have ~40% more bandwidth than the other, then that alone is enough of a that all the rest will fall sweetly into place.

On the other hand, I'm not expecting any architectural with R600. That truly is NVidia's preserve this generation.

Jawed

 

Still, that means 16 GDDR4 chips, instead of 12 or 8.
Surely a few coins will be lost per unit on the AIB front, no ?

 

For a long time we've been talking about the memory bandwidth being the bottleneck. There's two ways to deal with this - increase the memory bandwidth, or decrease how much memory bandwidth you need to use. If the 512 external memory bandwidth is true, I wonder if it means ATI has decided to go for broke on the DX10 inflection point - just as they did on the DX9 inflection point.

Don't you think fully unified is enough of an architectural , or are you blase about it because it's assumed to be the case already? If ATI had kept it quiet and we didn't know what we know about Xenos, we'd be going if we'd suddenly got a unified architecture.

 

There'd be 512MB and 1GB versions, I guess. You'd expect to be able to retail 1GB cards for more, too.

7950GX2 is seriously more costly than 7900GTX, isn't it?... Any signs of a revolt?...

Jawed

 

I think the only way that happens is if G80 winds up being unable to support GDDR4 at high frequencies for some reason. Otherwise, a refresh could remedy a good bit of the bandwidth imbalance. Not to mention addressing power concerns....

I think it far more likely that we will be looking at these two architectures in late spring considering bandwidth vs. computational power. I consider it quite possible that G80 will be unbalanced in favor of computational ability, while R600 might be unbalanced in favor of higher bandwidth.

/me readies his popcorn emoticon.

 

Well not only is each GX2 PCB probably (?) simpler than anything we'll see with R600, but the G71 chip itself is probably dirt cheap compared to what R600 will go for. GX2's are going for $500 now.

 

Oh I believe ATI will both increase bandwith and increase the efficiency with which it's used. The patents make that pretty clear. (And, no doubt, G80 will benefit from doing both these things, too.)

I'll be fairly shocked, for example, if R600 has 120GB/s of bandwidth but can fully utilise that with only 16 TMUs and 16 ROPs. That would be truly stunning.

I dare say I believe in both IHVs' ability to design a GPU around the target bandwidth. If you look at what X1k and GF7 can do with only 22GB/s and compare that to what X8.. GF6 can do, you'll see some pretty impressive things.

So, I'm highly confident that if ATI delivers a GPU with 120GB/s bandwidth, the entire GPU will live up to that.

What's more intriguing to me is how G80 can "double performance" with only 86GB/s...

I'm blase about it because of Xenos Xenos does things that aren't even in D3D10... Xenos is a truly stunning bit of kit.

Jawed

 

How so? If r600 isn't , what is from ati ...

 

I'm not suggesting that R600's success will be dependant on G80's failure, and I don't really want the thread to drift off in that direction. R300 was not judged on the competing product from Nvidia, because that was not available. R300 was judged on what it brought us from a performance and IQ point of view, and the unexpected tech it used to do that.

I'm just suggesting that unification and the DX10 inflection point will give ATI the opportunity to do some interesting and unexpected things that might bring us the same kind of technology related that we had when R300 was sprung on us. It could be especially important to ATI to gain back the ground it lost over the last year with it's poor execution. We're already somewhat over the thought of a 512 bus, and we already know we're getting a unified architechture (which would be worth another if we didn't already know/expect it).