More R480 / AMR speculation

[Phantom69]

Text from www.rage3d.com

Italian website Hardware Upgrade has an article online with some rumours about ATI's upcoming R480 and R430 based graphic cards. They say that there will be three new cards based on these new cores.

The fastest of the new cards to be released on Decemeber 1st will be the R480XT "Platinum Edition" which is a 16-pipe, 540MHz part and will feature 590MHz GDDR3 memory. There will also be a slightly slower R480XT which will also features 16-pipes but will have a 520MHz clock and 540MHz GDDR3 memory. Both of those cores are built using TSMC's 130nm low-k manufacturing process.

Finally, there will be a R480Pro based card that will have 12-pipes and, like the R480XT, will feature a 520MHz core and 540MHz GDDR3 memory but unlike either of the XT cards will be built using TSMC's 110nm manufacturing process.

Here's a Google butchered translation of a section of the article:

The Canadian producer is prepared launch, next 1 December, one new range of cards video of wraps high destined to sostiture the cards Radeon X800. They are not available at the moment details on the name of the new solution, but it is for sure that ATI has chosen the production process to 0.11 micron for this new family of chip. The choice allows to contain the production costs, obtaining a greater number of chip video for every wafer, beyond optimistically improving the productive yields tutt' other that satisfactory that at the present moment ATI records for the chip of the family Radeon X800.

They also have a few details regarding ATI's rumoured AMR technology. The most interesting bit is that ATI's Multi-Rendering technology will not require users to have two of the same type of card. So, in theory, you could go buy a R520, then when the new Super-Fantastic-R720XRT based cards come, go buy one of those and have both work in tandem... in theory...

* A.M.R. operates with cards video standard: it is not necessary to use particular versions of cards video, as it happens for NVIDIA that it demands I use it of GeForce cards 6600 GT, GeForce 6800 GT and GeForce 6800 Ultra;
* it does not need of some type of extra logon: the cards communicate between of they through bus Pci Express with which they are connected to the card mother, therefore nothing extra connectors on the cards video;
* technology AMR will come supported from the future versions of cards mothers based on chipset ATI RS480 and RS400: the first one is the coded name of the family of chipset Radeon Xpress 200, introduced the slid Monday, for processori AMD Athlon 64. The second, instead, indicates solution chipset ATI for processori Intel Pentium 4 and cards video Pci Express;
* it will be possible to use cards different video Pci Express connected between of they: this does not imply uses it of identical architectures between of they in order making to operate cards video in parallel. Like case limit, they will be able to be quite used chip the video integrated in chipset the ATI, even if from the prestazionale point of view it is not thinkable to obtain interesting boost prestazionali.

HTH

 

[trinibwoy]

Hmmm why does ATI always have to try and do everything better and faster than Nvidia I just hope boards based on ATI chipsets don't suck ass.

 

[Wunderchu]

cool 8)

 

[Nick]

Hmmm why does ATI always have to try and do everything better and faster than Nvidia I just hope boards based on ATI chipsets don't suck ass.

They announce everything faster than NVIDIA. Since they are technologically behind, they have to announce how fast and/or feature-rich their future hardware will be. Anyway the step from Radeon 9700 to 9800 was nice and I don't think this will be much different.

 

[whql]

When did speculation from a website equal an annoucement? We're not talking about a product announcement one year and then 6 months later 10,000 boards actually turn up...

 

[whql]

I just hope boards based on ATI chipsets don't suck ass.

The reviews of RS480 would seem to say that they dont, so if they are suing the same chipset why would they get any worse?

 

[trinibwoy]

I just hope boards based on ATI chipsets don't suck ass.

The reviews of RS480 would seem to say that they dont, so if they are suing the same chipset why would they get any worse?

I meant suck ass for overclocking/tweaking - who cares if they just 'work' ?

 

[Tim]

I meant suck ass for overclocking/tweaking - who cares if they just 'work' ?

The RS480 seems to beat the nForce 3 in overclocking, at least in the anandtech review.

 

[whql]

I meant suck ass for overclocking/tweaking - who cares if they just 'work' ?

This is what some reviews seemed to note the most about the boards. Did you read any? There was, afterall, a thread here discussing it.

 

[trinibwoy]

This is what some reviews seemed to note the most about the boards. Did you read any? There was, afterall, a thread here discussing it.

Haven't read any. Checking them out now.

 

[Bjorn]

I meant suck ass for overclocking/tweaking - who cares if they just 'work' ?

The RS480 seems to beat the nForce 3 in overclocking, at least in the anandtech review.

They also compared it to a nForce 4 board. It wasn't faster in all tests but achieved a record mem overclock:

Move over, nVidia, because the ATI Reference board reached an amazing 283x10 at 4X HyperTransport and 2.5-3-3-10 memory timings.

Not a big overclocker myself (mostly because you need expensive RAM and then i'd rather buy a faster CPU, feels better somehow ) but it's really nice that the AMD64 get's a motherboard with a IGP that definitely doesn't fail on performance. Talking about CPU performance then though. The IGP itself is not exactly a overachiever, unless you look at the competing IGP's of course.

 

[kemosabe]

Great overclocking is a bonus, but if anything is going to help ATI achieve volume sales of the XPress 200 and hence make the R&D investment worthwhile, it is stability/compatibility far more than anything else.

And Fuad seems to have slapped his ATI sources out of their recent coma.