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Despite all that has been glittering like gold or pyrites before, it transpires that ATI flagship R520 cunningly nicknamed \"Fudo\" will feature only sixteen pipelines. The sources close to the company earlier indicated that the R520 might have even more pipes but this won't be the case. The R580 will end up with more pipes but R520 has its higher clock to fight Nvidia's counterpart.
Some of the chips will work at 700MHz or even 800MHz but yields at those speeds won't be satisfactory. Nevertheless, there is a good indication that overclockers will like this tech as will get them to run at sky high speeds.
The cards are floating around and ATI could paper launch them even now but would not be able to ship it until the first days of October. That is the rough launch date for this product launch and availability. I don’t think that you will be able to buy R520 master cards at this time but those will follow in a few weeks time after the normal ones.
The performance will be very close to existing 7800 GTX but we don’t know weather will R520 end up faster or slower than this Nvidia flagship card. However it turns out it will be close, very close.
Funny thing is that a few quarters back Nvidia was so scared of the R520 that it postponed its NV50 project and brought G70, more pipelines version of tweaked NV40 marchitecture and harvested the market with it.
Nvidia is still the only company shipping its current generation high end part while ATI will launch its answer one quarter later. ATI missed the back to school period and it might be tight to get into the Thanksgiving Day shopping hype but will sure be on this for the Yule.
Q4 is always the most profitable quarter for the industry as there is something with colder weather and computer shopping. This can be applied to Europe and USA while it's warm in Australia at this time but those guys still like to buy parts then. I do hope you have been enjoying my stint of weather forecasting, and I predict that things will precipitate from the skies when the barometer and the Moon are in Uranus.
Personally I think that this is partly true. There will most likely be a mid-range form that only has 16 pipes. This assumption is based off the fact that many times we will get information about an upcoming chip that says it has a lower number of pipes then everybody was expecting and the people reporting this are not told is that it only applies to specific cards. A perfect example of this was when the R2420 was coming out. There was rumors everywhere about how many pipes it would have. Many said 16, some said 12, and even some said 8. Well, we have gotten all three, in different configurations, using the same core.
As I said, there will most likely be different cards with a different amount of pipelines. So the Inquirer is probably right, but they just do not have all the information.
Last edited by KoolDrew on Sun Sep 04, 2005 8:31 pm; edited 1 time in total
As I said, there will most likely be different cards with a different amount of pipelines. So the Inquirer is probably right, but they just do not have all the information.
Anyone know when release of G70 & G80 is? As well as that of R580?
Contributed by Predator, Guest 510 iVirtua Loyalty Points • • • Back to Top
1. Late September Launch Date Set for Three R500 Desktop Discrete Chips (R520, RV530, and RV515): Addressing the rampant rumours surrounding the R520 launch date, ATI stated its plan of record is to launch all three 90nm R500 desktop discrete chips (the enthusiast R520, the performance RV530, and the value RV515) in late September. The shipment dates will likely be staggered for the three chips, based on the delivery cycles from TSMC, with one likely shipping at launch date and the other two within the first half of October. The R520 was originally planned for a June launch, while the RV530 and RV515 launch times are only a few weeks delayed from their original schedule. The R520 had been sampling since Dec/04, and although the architecture and 90nm process were not a problem, ATI was not able to run the clock fast enough due to a “soft ground” issue that was discovered in late July after debugging with several re-spins. Specifically, the R520 and RV530 had functional yields, but could not run at high speeds, while the RV515 and the C1 (the 90nm Xbox graphics chip) did not have any issues. ATI concedes it has lost the OEM designs (primarily Dell) to NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX for enthusiast desktop PCs for both the back-to-school and holiday season, but believes the retail and channel (add-in-board) markets for the R520 chip remain available (representing over 2/3rds of the enthusiast market). Both ATI and NVIDIA did not refresh their back-to-school product stack for the performance/mainstream/value segments, with ATI indicating it has kept a significant share of design wins awarded in the March to May timeframe, based on its ATI X700, X600, X550, and X300 (competing against NVIDIA’s GeForce 6200 and 6600). In terms of performance, ATI believes the R520 should exceed the GeForce 7800 GTX in benchmark tests if it can get the proper clock speed, but recognizes that NVIDIA has some headroom to overclock the GeForce 7800 clock speeds. We do not expect ATI to launch its R580 (speculated to have 32 pixel pipelines) in C2005 (ATI does not want to stall the channel for the R520), and expect a refresh of the R500 family beginning in spring 2006 with RV560, followed by RV540 and RV505. We expect the R600 (DirectX 10, targeting Microsoft Vista operating system and WGF 2.0, the next generation graphics library) in Q4/F06 or Q1/F07.
Also the G70's are already out (G = GeForce, 70 = 7 series). I don't know about release date of the G80's, but you could probably find something searching google. It is all probably just speculation and it will be a while before they come out.
Here is some more info.
Quote:
NVIDIA's Chief Architect David Kirk has said in the recent interview that they will do a unified architecture in hardware when it makes sense and when it is possible to make the hardware work faster unified. It will be easier to build in the future, but for the meantime, there's plenty of mileage left in this G70 architecture.
VR-Zone came to know that the future is actually pretty near where NVIDIA G80 design is based on unified shader architecture slated to appear in 2006. ATI has already taken the unified approach for their R500 Xenon within the XBox 360 and has 48 unified pipelines.As we know, in an unified shader architecture, there are no dedicated vertex and pixel shader engines but unified shader engine capable of executing both types of instructions.
G70 already supports Longhorn WGF 1.0 API so most likely G80 will support WGF 2.0 with improved virtualization techniques and new pipeline stages. The likely process technology choice for G80 is 90nm and the architecture is made for high core speed (~1GHz). G80 design is completed and waiting for ATI R580 when the time comes.
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