The LAST R600 Rumours & Speculation Thread

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Rangers said:
I agree with most of your points, but you act as if the companies are fated to bring out equal products. Therefore it's just a question of how small they can get their dies.

That's not true at all. Bigger dies, even more heat, are great, provided they provide a commisurate performance increase. That was ATI's problem..

ATI should have been about twice as fast as Nvidia last time around. That's the bottom line..what would the market share have looked like then? (this is a seperate issue from delays though..)

Big does not equal inefficient..
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I agree with that. My point was that gross margins, time to market and profits were driving ATI back in the R3xx days. Smaller die sizes, mature fab processes and not pushing the bleeding edge on clock speeds helped ATI build the runaway success that R3xx was. For whatever reason, be it the natural progression of ATI engineering or my "infatuated with the technolgy" supposition, ATI has gone to completely the opposite extreme and Nvidia has become the company in the R3xx mode of thinking. With that being said, I held a 8800 GTS in my hands the other day...OMG is it big!!... so maybe Nvidia is going with bigger is better now too.

Maybe R600 will be ATI's Core2Duo and give them much needed breathing room and an advantage over Nvidia that they can translate into higher sales, market share and earnings. Time will tell if ATI knew something we didn't know all along or if they are just too busy being engineers and don't spend enough time wearing the coat and tie. I have always liked and supported ATI and the stock ATYT made me alot of money overall. I wish them well...
 
Ailuros said:
With as many different architectures, one significant PC product cancellation and what not, the period might even be longer.



Someone told me some time ago when I asked why ATI consistently choses the smallest manufacturing processes that they might have some sort of special agreement with TSMC to get better prices for those. I haven't the slightest clue if such agreements even exist, but if yes then it would at least explain part of the whole reasoning behind it.

That still obviously isn't anywhere close as being better to the "minimize risk/maximize margins" strategy of NV, but it would at least explain why ATI hasn't as rapidly changed strategy as NV did after the NV30 flop.
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Any "better pricing" would have manifested itself in higher gross margins which it has not. even if such an agreement was struck, the lower yields would eat up that savings quickly.

"Then spare me the financial lecture if you please, since some of us have been around for quite a bit longer and some of use have a wider picture for what ATI stood and stands for both on the financial as on the technology front."

LOL. Companies don't have that luxury in the year 2006 and beyond. Weak companies get put into bankruptcy or they get aquired once they start to hemmorage money and cede market share.

"If you're so good in financials as you've repeated for so many times in one single post, then let me know if ATI's financials would be any better if they would had released for several product cycles now in a timely fashion yet with less competitive products in the end. Want to bet that if R600 was released say a month before G80 that ATI would had been accused for a large flop?"

That's an easy one. ATI is responsible and obligated to do BOTH. They must field competitive products in a timely manner to counter or better yet preempt the competition. Anything else is just bad business, poor management or both. Ask GM, Ford, Intel, AMD or any other company you can think of.

I am sensing a tone that you are feeling attacked or have been backed into some corner unfairly by me. That is not my intention...again our perspectives are different and I appreciate your viewpoint even though I may not share it.
 
As for level505, I found something rather interesting on the site, although could very well be completely irrelavent and unrelated. Look right below the RSS link where it says "secret" and "shh don't click". Following the link it, leads to somebody advertising a method to make money via web traffic, etc.. Coincidence?

http://west08.richjerk.hop.clickbank.net/
 
Anyone else see this?

"Update - Site, Upcoming 2560×1600 Benchmark, Pictures
Happy new year! We are sorry that the site slowed down a bit. However, here are the great news: tomorrow we will be testing 2560×1600, and we will be able to provide limited pictures of the card approx. on January 5th/6th already. For everyone to understand why we cannot just “black outâ€￾ the ID Tags: The major tag is a fine punched hologram foil wrap which cannot be taken off because it is glued onto the front metal around the DVI ports. Taking off the fan is impossible without removing it. We will definitely keep you updated, and appreciate all comments we have received so far."

http://level505.com/2006/12/30/the-full-ati-r600-test

So there will be pictures of R600 tomorrow or saturday?
 
 
Ummm...

Important Notice
We had some unsual development of heat on our Intel QX6700 (180 °F) which obviously caused the CPU to throttle down. We are investigating this issue right now and if we find this had no impact on the GPU test earlier, we publish the full scores. We are holding them back until we are sure the performance was not biased by this. It’s not gonna take long.
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From you know who.
 
I'm not sure I really want to get sucked into this discussion (interesting though it is to read), but I do want to respond to this:

Ailuros said:
In a market where power consumption for each unit is probably at the highest priority, wouldn't also want to think that any delay is less relevant than what each GPU consumes in the end?
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Power consumption is the highest priority, with one caveat: the laptop market has a very strong cycle, tied to Intel's roughly annual release of a new mobile platform. Even AMD-based laptops are on the same cycle, since OEMs need to release new AMD laptops to compete with the new Intel laptops. All the laptop makers design around this platform and release schedule, so they all evaluate the available graphics technology and make a decision at roughly the same time. Because mobile designs are so custom, once a chip has been selected and designed in, switching it for another chip is very hard to do.

The point is, you have to have the best power consumption (more accurately, best perf/watt within the OEM-determined power envelope) at the time the OEMs are making their decision.

This is a big part of why ATI was so strong in mobile for so long. They tend to have a longer delay between tapeout and shipping product (even ignoring outliers like R520), which translates to having silicon earlier even if they eventually ship at the same time. This allowed them to meet OEM sampling schedules when Nvidia missed them, even if both had the same production schedule. I've been told this is the main reason GeForce 6200 (NV44) didn't get many laptop design wins even though it was fairly competitive -- it simply showed up too late. It appears that the traditional roles reversed on this last cycle. Unless ATI has the mobile derivatives of R600 coming very close behind it, things don't look good for them this cycle either.
 
I've now finished reading and I cannot recall what evidence was put forward for r600 to be delayed from it's 1Q launch, my assumption is still that it will be Feb/March. As for AMD sacking people for late delivery .. well they just released a 65nm chip pretty late and it is worse performing than it's older 90nm compatriot, so they can hardly fire Orton :D

My expectation is that it will arrive roughly when expected and perform roughly as expected.

Certainly though they will not get the glossy wonderment as nvidia did with G80 though, I agree with people who say that in this respect the advantage is always with the company that strikes first and gets the big gains, otherwise you are seen as just matching what has gone before.

Unless of course r600 is a mutha of a gpu !
 
armchair_architect said:
The point is, you have to have the best power consumption (more accurately, best perf/watt within the OEM-determined power envelope) at the time the OEMs are making their decision.

Unless ATI has the mobile derivatives of R600 coming very close behind it, things don't look good for them this cycle either.
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As mentioned before, M7x series Mobile Radeon X2x00's have been around since December allready signifying that complaining about R600 and how it will affect laptop sales is BS.
The fact that the the M71 is allready WHQL'd (in cat 6.12) indicates that this product has been available to everyone for quite some time allready.. at least enough to be involved with OEM decissions.

Connecting the delay of a high end graphics card with the sale of low voltage notebook chips is.. cuckoo?
 
overclocked_enthusiasm said:
I am sensing a tone that you are feeling attacked or have been backed into some corner unfairly by me. That is not my intention...again our perspectives are different and I appreciate your viewpoint even though I may not share it.
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No no I haven't anything against you personally; just the fact that you're approaching a graphics IHV almost exclusively in sterile financial figures sends shivers down my spine.
 
neliz said:
As mentioned before, M7x series Mobile Radeon X2x00's have been around since December allready signifying that complaining about R600 and how it will affect laptop sales is BS.
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I don't believe that anyone here thinks that the R600 itself will affect laptop sales. But, the R600 will be a good indicator of AMD's new architecture which the laptop chips will be based on. Things won't look that good on the mobile side if the R600 consumes much more power then the G80 and has similar performance.
 
overclocked_enthusiasm said:
That's an easy one. ATI is responsible and obligated to do BOTH. They must field competitive products in a timely manner to counter or better yet preempt the competition. Anything else is just bad business, poor management or both. Ask GM, Ford, Intel, AMD or any other company you can think of.
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I guess that's the core of the arguement, and the problem I see with this is that you're presenting things as if they fucked up in a voluntary manner. Assuming both companies have the same priorities, there will always be a winner, otherwise it's not a competitive business. ATI hardly had worse perf/mm2 and worse perf/watt on purpose, nor did they actually choose to have library problems on 90nm that delayed their line-up. The former is bad engineering, the latter is just bad luck, especially so given the actual production process was mature.

In the end, from a financial point of view, NVIDIA obviously has everything going for it nowadays. But that's not because Marvin Buckett is the best CFO in the history of mankind; it's very much so because their engineering department had better success than ATI's, for various reasons that we cannot easily be certain of as outsiders. While ATI's roadmaps in the last few years haven't been absolutely mind-blowing, they certainly haven't been substantially worse than NVIDIA's either.

It's hard to determine whether a company's success comes primarily from its technology or its strategy and marketing. In the NV40/R420 timeframe, arguably, it was the latter; nowadays, I feel it's much more the former. It remains to be seen whether ATI can fix that with their R6xx line-up or whether it'll be too little, too late in terms of marketshare and margins.


Uttar
 
Bjorn said:
I don't believe that anyone here thinks that the R600 itself will affect laptop sales. But, the R600 will be a good indicator of AMD's new architecture which the laptop chips will be based on. Things won't look that good on the mobile side if the R600 consumes much more power then the G80 and has similar performance.
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R600 a good indicator of AMD's new architecture? in notebook land it's still the other way around, low end ATI chips still offer more performance for the same Watt. with Fusion showing up in two years time, what we're seeing now is a final separation of the markets. No longer will notebook GPU's be discrete card derivative but a genuinely new architecture with no direct link to whatever you will put in that 32x PCIe slot in 2009
 
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