Huddy says "R600"

I just hope R600 can live up to all the hype generated by its architectural sex appeal Although 128+GB/s of bandwidth is certainly a very good place to start.

 

I think he means impact due to novelty. We've been talking about unified shaders and ring-buses and and ultra-threading for a year now. So some of r600's wow points are kind of "old" already.

 

It certainly gives me more confidence that these things will work well in R600, as we know they've been effectively given a test-run in earlier products. It will be second generation unification and ring-bus memory controllers in R600, so I'd expect to see significant improvements and any first generation issues to have been sorted.

 

Yep, so it will be ATi's sleek, sexy and refined vs Nvidia's immature, unnatural and all around weird Place your bets !

 

To paraphrase that Nvidia engineer: "384 bits! That's just unnatural! Is there some IEEE standard that uses 384 for anything?"

I think I will dub G80 as "the design pulled from Satan's backside".

 

I doubt a pair of G71s at 7950GX2's launch were dirt cheap in comparison with R600 at its coming launch. And a GX2 PCB (either from the pair) is hardly as simple as a 7900GT's board, either.

But I expect 1GB of GDDR3 at 7950GX2's launch will be notably cheaper than 1GB of GDDR4 at R600's launch.

I just think that at a $700 retail price, say, there won't be too many complaints about profit-margin per R600 from AIBs. And particularly not if there's a decent range of lower-specified R6xx cards to sell as well. It's quantities and actual performance that'll be the battleground in D3D10, at each price point.

They'll be complaining about not having R6xx to sell from November though. Who wants to sell X1950XTX against GF8800GTS? And if R600 costs $700 in Feb, while 8800GTX costs $550, will punters want to pay the extra for 30-50% extra performance (assuming there is a substantial difference in performance)?

I just can't believe ATI is missing Christmas with R600. If you want to argue about AIB happiness then that's a far bigger deal than how many layers the PCB is.

Jawed

 

If ATI built a GPU based upon scalar ALUs and/or unified TMUs and ROPs, then I'd be

We know what a unified GPU looks like.

Jawed

 

Hmmm I don't know. If I were a betting man, I'd say margins on G71's were pretty high from day one.

First bet is in - R600 will be 30-50% faster than G80 !!!

 

You've done it now - expect to see this reported on TheInq by end of Monday...

 

Yeah.
Along with G80 being 90nm, and them having difficulty with putting a 512bit bus on the card because the GPU is 90nm (as if anything smaller was actually easier to do ?), and G80 having everything "dis-unified", etc, etc.

The Inq is really reaching these days...

 

Weren't early expectations for R600 around November 06 as well. Are you basing this assumption on the sheer expected superiority of R600 or do you think R600 (Feb06) > R600 (Nov06) ?

 

LOL, hmm reminds me of fp24

 

While the 512-bit bus might seem too good to be true, the R600 with it's 32 ROPs and 64 unified "pipes" (2X32TMUs and 96 ALUs) should be able to fill it up nicely.

 

I'm fairly sure there was a time when we were expecting R600 before Christmas, but that's so long ago...

The performance thing is solely based upon bandwidth: 120GB/s versus 86GB/s. If the rumours have any worth, of course.

Jawed

 

Yeah, but that alone wasn´t necessarily based on knowledge, just blind guessing around. Same with G80, but different. We expected it to arrive not later than mid-year at some point (after all the talks about it from devs and NV themselves), but it never happened.

Regarding their 80nm schedule, I don´t think anyone can deny that they were late to the game already at the point when they decided to go with the shrink, but they really didn´t have much of a choice there, because introducing them on 90nm would´ve been rather pointless to waste time and money for. Hurting their margins even more (when lowering ASPs on their high-end SKUs) isn´t really an option if NV can always outclass you by their relative and vast die area advantage.

Let´s also not forget that RV560/RV570 is not a "simple" 1:1 shrink to the next full-node, but different ASICs which had to be designed around the 80nm half-node, which takes time and depending on the maturity can also have an effect on your introduction date (as is inventory or market-demand). Q4 isn´t that bad, but they had promised those parts not later than mid-September. Something like that shouldn´t happen again, if they want to keep their AIBs happy.

R600 was never (i haven´t seen any roadmaps that hinted otherwise) intended to be introduced this year, which makes sense if some of these rumours turn out to be true. They basically want to even their mistakes that lead to their relative >6 month shortfall they have on NV, so they probably decided: Why waste any more time with half the guts, when we can show the market that we´re still committed to leadership, even if we got a little late (as in: totally messed up our timetable) last generation. NV won´t sit still, that´s for sure and since ATi knows that, their simply is no other way than to go full-throttle.

However, the problem with that is and it always was that if they´ll offer something very powerful, making money out of it and pleasing the AIBs is a completely different story. R600 better be scalable enough to account for their super-high-end-lower-margin-SKU-monster or we really will have another R300-based story here, but ATi should know that by now.

 

I have seen many PCBs in my life, but the GX2 isn´t really looking complex at all. Let´s not forget we´re not asking something like 12-16 layers here, but mass-manufacturable, dirt cheap, 08/15 8-layer PCBs that will be delivered in pairs, which would prolly drive the total cost to about 150-180% of one 7950GT (at launch, now even cheaper), but not much more.

Looking at the price range NV still does high margins on their GTs, the GX2 isn´t that much of a feat at all. What is so smart about it is the way NV marketed it and it´s performance, relative to it´s price.

R600 should be a hell of a lot more more expensive to make, if all the rumours are indeed true. They´ll need GDDR4, they´ll need at least 12 layers, they´ll need buttloads of power-related components...and G80 already looks like it´s at-the-end-of doable 12-layer designs, but that´s hard to guess without wiring data etc.

 

Marv, some Crytek devs and some contacts i always have handy to double-check.

Me too. Just wanted to give some relative "introduction-date-trouble" examples, were we tend to keep our hopes up, but instead there is some delay regarding their time-to-market schedule or some unusual induced delay we can´t know of, at least not until we´ve heard otherwise.