The LAST R600 Rumours & Speculation Thread
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The delay is as real as it can get; direct quotes, B3D sources etc.This "news" dates 2007-02-22, so HKPEC news writers sleep well yesterday, or someone made a bad joke about the whole delay story.
The infos in the link sounds like "Fuad inq infos"
Do you have any idea where they said this? What interview and where? I'd like to quote that.
Richteralan
Regular
HKEPC joined for the r600 rumor squad
"According to Taiwan's consumer mapping industry revealed AMD将 mapping industry in the end of February to provide samples of the latest version of R600 mapping results, CeBIT in Germany and the General Assembly on public display, but this is not an official release date R600. Therefore, the General Assembly and test results would not be made public R600, AMD tentatively scheduled for March 30 will be formally announced."
"In addition, the R600 will be times when the two lower models, including R600XT and R600XL. R600XT code Catseye (102-B006) will be set up XTX version of the same PCB Subtotal, core connections will decline 10-15% over the XTX version, the memory will be reduced to 512MB. and the switch to a lower speed GDDR3 particles cards for the same 9.5-inch long, the maximum power the same as pumped. expected to be released on April 19."
"According to mapping industry, R600 doubt on the effectiveness of the GeForce 8800 family can be overwhelming. However, the cost and price and more than able to compete with rivals into doubt R600 because of the cost of memory is more expensive than rivals."
http://www.google.com/translate?u=h...time=0&endtime=0&langpair=zh|en&hl=en&ie=UTF8
This "news" dates 2007-02-22, so HKPEC news writers sleep well yesterday, or someone made a bad joke about the whole delay story.
The infos in the link sounds like "Fuad inq infos"
Which doesn't surprise me because HKEPC is l'INQ in teh far east.
Unfortunately I can't find it. But I'm pretty darned certain it was in an interview right around the release of the NV40, where they said that they actually wrote the shader compiler for the NV30 last, after they'd already finished the hardware. And when they did that, they found it was vastly harder to writer a compiler for than expected. With the NV40 they wrote the compiler and designed the hardware together. That is what I recall, at least.Do you have any idea where they said this? What interview and where? I'd like to quote that.
Considering the fact how R600 then will turn out!
Did you see anyone claim so far that R600 will be a power saving wonder? Au contraire all speculative newsblurbs so far suggest a higher power consumption than G80.
I disagree, HKEPC hasnt had any of their news turn out false. IMO they are quite reliable.Which doesn't surprise me because HKEPC is l'INQ in teh far east.
That would be consistent with pushing the date out to address a broader section of the market, wouldn't it? They won't have the cheaper 512MB cards until late April.
The bolding was in what I quoted upstream, sorry.
Maybe they're going for a "6800GT" situation. If XT is full shaders and 512MB and 512-bit, it might stomp 8800GTS 640MB pretty conclusively. Dunno tho if the advantage of BW might be undercut by the smaller framebuffer for things like 8xmsaa. But the memory cost should be on their side then, as both are gddr3.
Maybe they're going for a "6800GT" situation. If XT is full shaders and 512MB and 512-bit, it might stomp 8800GTS 640MB pretty conclusively. Dunno tho if the advantage of BW might be undercut by the smaller framebuffer for things like 8xmsaa. But the memory cost should be on their side then, as both are gddr3.
Obviously! Because when the competition's part is late, that's been the cue to skip the rest of that architecture. I mean, that's what ATI did after NV30 was late and what NV did when R520 was late... right?
Silly people make me
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
Might be exactly that and they were being mostly truthful with the idea of wanting to launch a family. Sure with ATI and Nvidia, we were always used to a big bang for the flagship product, with limited availability and the mid-ranged versions sneaking out to little or no fanfare some months later.
However, the AMD way is to launch a range of product, with as much availability as possible (assuming Dell doesn't buy all their chips). You make a big fuss of the new technology, but at the same time you get to showcase the midrange and low range products, not just the $600 uber-card that very few can afford. The marketing of the flagship gives you added publicity for the everyday products that normally wouldn't get it.
Still it's pretty sucky for R600 to be delayed again, and the only way it will be forgiven by the early adopters is if it's pretty darn fantastic product. If it is some last minute internal politics that decided they wanted to do a "family launch", I don't see why they had to cancel Press Day at the last minute, unless it was only there to mislead everyone who was expecting the launch.
I'm leaning more towards something happening at the last minute that pushed everything back a few weeks, maybe the logistics of getting enough cards built and in the shops for availability, and then someone decided they might as well delay a bit more and launch the whole family to get a bigger bang for their marketing buck.
Boring for us, but there you go - they missed the chance to compete with G80, so whether it's by five months or six month probably make little difference now. The only other major pitfall is if AMD do launch R600 and get trumped by G80's refresh at the same time. That would be very bad indeed.
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No I seem to recall they completely missed the boat in the past and by a long shot.
Examples? Where their rumors or leaks turned out to be FUD.
Anarchist4000
Veteran
Besides the rumors they've been spinning away we haven't had anything to suggest that making the chips was a problem. Given the specs we have R600 efficiency would need to be downright horrendous to not compete well with G80, unless the part was horribly unbalanced to begin with.
In line with the 'family launch' idea what if they were wanting to 'hard launch' but for whatever reason were not going to be able to produce enough chips. Yield issues I think we would have seen a while ago. The one thing we didn't necessarily see coming was Nvidia falling flat on their face in regards to Vista drivers. Most OEMs I'd imagine want to be shipping Vista just for marketing purposes and stability is going to be very important to them. Most OEMs also don't offer 8800s as options for Vista or XP, it's essentially a retail only product. It's entirely possible that demand was significantly higher than AMD was expecting. If Dell placed a large order they very well could be struggling to get enough chips for the hard launch which they promised.
It still looks like we're seeing more than a 1 month slide in launch date though. Which brings up the question. Just how fast can you produce chips? If the order was doubled I could see it taking a month until the final products were assembled. And with it looking unlikely Nvidia would be able to compete in the near future a slide might not have been a problem.
Also benchmarking on AMD chips instead of Intel chips is always a plausible reason.
In line with the 'family launch' idea what if they were wanting to 'hard launch' but for whatever reason were not going to be able to produce enough chips. Yield issues I think we would have seen a while ago. The one thing we didn't necessarily see coming was Nvidia falling flat on their face in regards to Vista drivers. Most OEMs I'd imagine want to be shipping Vista just for marketing purposes and stability is going to be very important to them. Most OEMs also don't offer 8800s as options for Vista or XP, it's essentially a retail only product. It's entirely possible that demand was significantly higher than AMD was expecting. If Dell placed a large order they very well could be struggling to get enough chips for the hard launch which they promised.
It still looks like we're seeing more than a 1 month slide in launch date though. Which brings up the question. Just how fast can you produce chips? If the order was doubled I could see it taking a month until the final products were assembled. And with it looking unlikely Nvidia would be able to compete in the near future a slide might not have been a problem.
Also benchmarking on AMD chips instead of Intel chips is always a plausible reason.
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Apples to Oranges. The NV3x was much more difficult to write a shader compiler for. The R300 practically didn't need one, as its performance on unoptimized translation was already much better than the NV30. The NV3x had tons of gotchas where an instruction stream could lead to pathologically bad performance.
Not that I want to bring up NV30 <-> R600 comparisons, because undoubtedly, the R600 won't be fubared performance wise like the NV3x, but from the PR standpoint, I'm noticing a bizarre deja vu here. When NV30 was delayed, oversized and hot, expensive, and arrived as not the performance killer everyone expected, discussion in forums shifted to other "benefits" of NVidia, like UDA, high quality drivers, OpenGL performance, away from the HW itself. Basically, if you can't win on HW, you shift the PR discussion to other issues.
Now that ATI has no new product shipping and it looks much delayed and pricey, and possibly not the world-performance-beater, lo-and-behold, all the discussion is centered around ATI's release of Vista drivers vs NVidia's as if consumers should wait six months for an unknown R600 product because darnit, the R300-R580 Vista drivers were good and NVidia has bugs.
If I remember correctly its somewhere in the order of 12 weeks from production to start to completed wafer in your hands.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
I don't think that's fair. Recent discussion on Vista drivers were triggered by a few key events
- everyone asking where the Nvidia Vista driver are, months after Vista ships. Continuing promises from Nvidia being pushed back, and many reports of driver problems under Vista on Nvidia's hardware.
- the blog from the owner of Voodoo PC on his preference for ATI drivers for Vista, mostly for the above reasons.
- the Slashdot posting of a "mysterious programmer working for one of the two big graphics companies" complaining of Vista driver issues and how it meant Vista drivers would be problematic for a long time, and the effective instant outing of this person as a Nvidia programmer by Terry Makedon publicly denying this person as a ATI employee.
There's actually been very little from AMD about their Vista drivers, other than the fact they've worked hard and they think they've done a good job, even though we can only test on their DX9 hardware. I don't think we can really call this as AMD shifting the discussion to drivers to distract from their hardware position. They've been mentioning their efforts on Vista drivers quietly on and off for most of last year, with little or no reference to R600 in most cases.
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