Sunday, December 16th 2007
ATI R680 PCB Design and Cooling Early Pics
Here are some leaked pictures from ATI R680, courtesy of ChipHell. What you'll see on the PCB are 2x RV670XT GPUs and one PLX chip for communication between the two cores. All the sixteen memory chips (8 on the front and 8 on the back side) are missing from the board, probably because of the early development stage (that's not a finished product). Source said the card is using 0.7ns GDDR4 memory.
Source:
ChipHell
77 Comments on ATI R680 PCB Design and Cooling Early Pics
Why not just make a dual core gpu? Why bother with these huge boards? Maybe they should make a separate add in card to hold the voltage regulators and mosfets (joking)? :confused::laugh:
And don't a lot of the 8800 series have 16 ROPs just like the HD2900 and 3850/70? Yet Nvidia still pulls ahead with the same amount of ROPs... I don't think it's the ROP's fault, completely, it's gotta be something else.
To me this seems much more elegant than Nvidias Frankenstein (7950GX2) with two cards strap up as one with some Macgyver tape.
Because at that time, when ATI was dominating the market with X1900 and X1950, NVidia was busy working on the G80 because DX10 was around the corner and it paid off. NVidia was well prepared for DX10 unlike ATi which rolled out its first DX10 offering months after NV. Even today, NV is two steps ahead of ATi
BTW, the 7950 GX2 is the FASTEST DX9 card. Period. It was just a makeshift card to tackle X1950 XTX and keep consumers' attention maintained.
Amd has been in a tight situation thier worth less than what they paid for Ati.
I think the spider might have to due with quad core and quad gpu's.
ah, but this didnt kill ati (it did flop however)
ATi is screwed...
HD2900 = 11888 MP/s
HD3870 = 12400 MP/s
HD3850 = 10700 MP/s
8800GT = 9600 MP/s
The article at anandtech even suggests that Amd's ROP architecture is more balanced to say the least, and never worse: So if ROP capacity was the problem, G92 would never perform better than Radeons. Back when they wrote the article someone could have concluded that even if ROPs on G80 are not as efficient, they have more and thus it performed better. That's not the case though as G92 proves otherwise.
In the end, he is right when he said it's gotta be something else. Whether it it is texturing power or shading power is something really difficult to say, since on G80/G92 SP and TU are tied together and at the same time doubling the texture addressing power in G92 didn't mean any significant improvement over G80.
I switched over to nVIDIA a year ago, but I want to see AMD/ATI survive.
www.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/financials.asp?symb=ATI&sid=160919&report=1&freq=1
www.marketwatch.com/tools/quotes/financials.asp?symb=NVDA
Also don't forget that Ati has been in the game 8 years before Nvidia. Looking into this perspective who is the giant?
AMD is gonna go down and prices are gonna skyrocket in the processor war... But once Intel brings in there GPU's it will be a good fight between them and Nvidia
TBH, with all this leaked info coming out of ATI - which is extrmelly unusual, but has become more and more common over the last year . . . who's to say they're not going for some slight of hand? y'know, leaking info on stuff supposedly "in-development" to get their competition to look the other way while they're developing the real ass-kicker behind lock & key? ATI has done it before; releasing a sub-par "flagship" product while they get their hardware ironed out for the big-dog to be taken off the chain. For example, look at the X1800 series and how nVidia reacted to that while ATI prepared the X1900 series for launch.
Remember before the HD2900XT came out, there were pictures of some long cards (prototypes) which ppl thought would be the product that'd be launched as ATI's card to face the 8800 GTX?
It was the RV680.
ATI has this mantra of devising certain things in advance and trying out the market before bringing out a shocker.
After the 7800 GTX, it was X1800 XT (flop). Then they came up with X1900 XTX (beat the 7800 GTX) later 7900 GTX was launched and was combated by the X1950 XTX, Pro.
So there's a similarity and speculators like us should look for clues.
NV 2 steps ahead, ?? I think not...
In this kind of bussiness it's very easy to enter one market if there isn't any competition there. Only for entering the market you could take over ~20% of market share, of course if the product is good enough, not better than the compettion, just good. Samsung has followed this strategy many times, and I don't think I have to say they have succeeded.
On the other hand trying to enter a market in which there is already competition is very difficult. Can you remember XSI? Their cards were good, more or less on par with Nvidia or Ati (they had some drivers issues, but which new card doesn't nowadays?), but they were new in the game, there were alternatives to the better yet expensive cards in respective segments, so they didn't get any market share. There existed the possibility to buy the better Radeons or the worse but cheaper Nvidias. In this game there wasn't a place for XSI.
I know it's not the best example, since Volari had severe rendering issues on some games, but they could have had some market share for not gaming PCs for example.
If AMD goes down, someone will buy it, they are just not going to let it totally dissapear. The buyer could be IBM or Samsung, for example. If any of those buy AMD it could mean big troubles for Intel, since what AMD lacks, both of those have in excess. Money.