Huddy says "R600"

On a bit unrelated note, is it me or some people see the R600 like the second coming of Christ or something?

 

After re-reading the interview it very clear that number of ROPs will prob not increase.

So the question turns to will the current 1:1 TEX to ROP ratio change? 32 TEX with 16 ROPs seems very unbalanced, but maybe 24 TEX. Still 16 TEX doesn't seem to bad.

Reguarding ALUs than R580 was designed to perform well on titles for the comming year (higher ALU to TEX ratios).

R600 will be also in that period so the question becomes will R600 increase the ALU to TEX ratios again to higher than 3:1. Maybe only the high-end refreshes will alter the ratio?

ATI's design route of high numbers of threads seams to match well the increase in ALUs as this helps hide the texture fetch latency.

 

I'd definitely lean towards four arbiter/sequencer logic blocks for the first R600-series chip (and I'm not convinced the first chip is actually called R600), controlled by three command queues and 4:1 shader:tex ratio (and 16 ROPs).

 

I wonder where you got that idea...

 

My backside, as always

 

I sense an inside joke...

4:1 ratio...fine. 16 ROPs...fine. Four arbiter/sequencer with three command queues...??? (Might help if if knew the difference between a arbiter/sequencer and a command queue.)

Seriously tempted to say: "You're just making stuff up."

*sigh* I betray my own ingorance.

ERK

 

It's the basic makeup of Xenos, really. A command queue for each thread type, then arbiters/sequencers to decide what's run and when, and in what order, then the shader arrays and texture units to service those requests, ROPs to output.

It's basically me saying there's a GS queue and the chip is wider than Xenos, and you take it from there.

Read Wavey's Xenos piece to get the goodies.

 

Texturing is just an instruction within a shader program, so any texture ops would exist within the programs scheduled to execute in one of the reservation stations.

 

Thanks, Rys,

You know I've read the Xenos article a couple of times, but there's so much information in there it's easy to forget a lot.

ERK

 

Sorry for going on tangent with the kind of discussion going on here but Fuad is back with piece and this on on R600. Supposedly R600 is the first cable-less crossfire chip even though RV560/RV570 with the same functionality are being released first.

 

Well, it would be interesting if they went with another line of communication between the cards, like nVidia has. Having no cable only works well with lower-end designs where bandwidth between the cards isn't such a huge concern. Anyway, just like most of what Fuad spews, I'm sure it's got no credibility at all.

 

Samsung announced 1.6 GHz GDDR4 in February. I got the impression the chips could be delivered in sufficient quantity for high-end this year.

For a R580 update this summer, I would expect 1 - 1.2 GHz.

 

Its not talking about about communication via the bus.

 

no cable, no bus...wireless? (kidding)

 

Maybe I wasn't clear. I was implying that 32 texture units was my "unreasonable wish", and I'd be happy with 24. You're taking the bigger one and asking for twice the ROPs and 4 times the z units.

Sure, GDDR4 may give a big bump in BW, but I don't think ROP's are much of a limitation. 16 ROPs at 700MHz means a fullscreen 1600x1200 write in 20 microseconds, i.e. 1% of rendering time at 60fps.