Kinda depends on how you look at things really.
Hark back to Voodoo days and we have separate chips for the pixel pipeline and the texture pipeline - they were decoupled then (with a scalable number of texture units). We've gone through a whole mess of stuff since then, but if you look at something like Xenos there are remarkable paralells in that the texture pipes and the pixel pipes are separate chips!
The "pixel pipeline" can just be boiled down to the ROP's, which are still relatively fixed function elements that they were in Voodoo days - the texture piplines, though, have grown to be rather large, programmble units.
rwolf said:Last I checked R580 had a 16 pixel pipeline with 48 pixel processors. Just because the implementation is not always 1:1 for all components doesn't mean the pixel pipeline is not there.
Yeah, that's what he seems to be saying. No matter how many PDCs there are though it seems that according to Nvidia 16KB is available to share between threads. The number of PDCs is only important for latency hiding as they and the software will dictate how many threads/batches can be in flight.I think Uttar is saying that each cluster, which has two 16KB PDCs, adds up to a total PDC size of 256KB.
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geo said:
Hmmmm just in time to start speculating about R680....
Maybe that's the R630? I can't think the final R600 is only released now.
Isn't the Inq article saying that they are already in mass production? Or at least mass production of the chips - production of the actual cards is presumably just about to begin. Surely that's what they mean by "production silicon" - the first of the mass-produced chips (as opposed to samples).It's approximately 6 weeks from now to the second week of March. How much more do they need for mass production? (granted there are also the 2 weeks halt for the chinese new year, but I don't think it'll change anything dramatically in the end).
Well, we've usually seen 3 months between tape-out and availability. I wouldn't know how much time is subtracted if they already have chips in-house back from the fab. I would think two months or so to ramp production, but that's just a guess on my part. Taking into account the Chinese New Year though, I would personally think March would be a stretch...but...I imagine what they're talking about is the A15 silicon what may be used in the 'x2850' rather than the 'x2800'. It's possible they already have, or have had for awhile, A12 in production mode gearing up for the March launch. If nothing else, and this final silicon is not used for the March launch, we could see the A15 products shortly afterwards (April/May?)
Actually you can change the metal layer after production has started, as the metal layer added late in production pipe. So even if A15 did not exist when the production started, the final chips can end up as stepping - there are only a 3 month delay for silicon changes (and A12 and A15 is the same silicon).
Thanks for that information.
The question then is, would ATi change it mid-production? The chips already made could go into lower-end chips then, in theory, but that also begs the question:
Did A12 revision chips run so hot that only OEM's will initially get the XTX version (with the big-ass cooler, ~13'') while retail gets perhaps the XT/XL/(GTO) running at slower speeds on the 9'' PCB until A15 comes out and they can ramp to the speeds while using a smaller cooler (9'' pcb?).
At least seems a possibility, if enough A15's are not produced. If nothing else, whatever uses A15 at launch could be probably be rare-er, if not delayed past the initial launch if at least SOME parts are using A12. Remember the X1800XL availability, and the X1800XT not trickling into the market until a little later? It seems that could happen again.