NVIDIA Could Ready HD 4670 Competitor

[DarkMatter]

-65nm to 55nm brings a theoretical shrink of 19%. That's max 19%.
You are saying: G92 - 324 mm2 G92b - 231 mm2
Did nVidia make a shrink of 40%? Did it ever occur to you that pcper.com is wrong.

-G92b is not a true 55nm chip?? WTH! What is it then? 60nm?
Seriously, where did you read that? The chip shrank 18%, that means an almost perfect transition from 65nm to 55nm. Don't let anybody fool you, it's 55nm.

-So you are basically saying that:
Take a 9600GT, cut off ~1/4 of the chip, now clock it really high so it's close to 9600GT performance at $80. Wow this makes a lot of business sence. *sarcasm*
nVidia will never clock it higher than 650Mhz. You can be pretty sure of that.

HD4670: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500061
9500GT: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500061

Those are the cheapest prices, $80. First thing nVidia needs to do before it even can release a 9550GT is to drop the 9500GT price to ~$65.
And like i have said before, the HD4670 is a true lowend product. It's cheap to make and ATI can make it even cheaper.
Just look at that simple design: http://www.computerbase.de/bild/article/866/17
Very small PCB and very simple power circuitry, comparable to the much slower 9500GT.

So you have called me:
- LOL. You gotta love fanboism.
- Everytime you post is only to show your ignorance.
That's really nice of you! I have been on topic all the time, never called you names but you still need to say these stuff like a kid. Maybe you are a kid, i don't know.
The only reason why we have this discussion is because you are ignorant.
You look at matters with your limited knowledge of business and electronics, and always conclude that i'm wrong. Well i waited for the HD4670 to be released. Now i'll wait for the 9550GT to be released.

LOL. I say you are ignorant because you effectively are, mate. And you show it everytime you write. You have a hard time understanding things so I will go part by part again:

- 65 to 55 nm is effectively a ~40% reduction in size. See, it happens that chips are square and that fab. process is the minimum distance attainable between two transistors in an array of transistors. Because transistors are put on a 2 dimensional array: 65^2 / 55^2 = 1,39. Now if you know how to read that number, it means 65 nm is 40% bigger than 55nm. And think I have to explain this kind of things... :shadedshu

- In order to be a true 55nm chip you have to redesign it. For instance, within the chip (any chip), they have to add many redundant transistors, which their only job is refresh/amplify the signal between the ones that do the math (also many others are thre just to serve as resistors, but that later). Those have to be put at a distance according to the resistance of the medium in which they are present, just like radio repeaters. This means the optimum distance is constant for the same silicon alley. The transition of G92 to G92b was only optical, meaning the exact same structure was used, but where in 65nm (i.e) 5 repeaters where needed, in 55nm only 4 would be required. You have one only ocupying space.

Same principle can be applied to the "resistors". Basically on chips there are no resistors, engineers take benefit of the parasit resistance (a bunch of adjacent transistors act like a resistor to other transistors) to set the transistors to the desired output. They try to make the whole chip so that all working (the ones that have a function, that take part on ALUs etc.) act like resistors to each other, but that is impossible to 100%, so redundant transistors are required. Because at 55nm you need less voltage, resistors values can be smaller, so you need less of them. Again because G92b is just the same chip made smaller it has more than what a true 55nm chip would require.

- They are not cuttin 1/4 of the chip, by no means. See, again you show ignorance.
And it doesn't make sense what? Competing doesn't make sense? Probably they are releasing a new 9600GT (9650GT?) based on G94b with higher clocks, so it wouln't compete with it anyway, we really don't know.

- More things, the price difference between 128bit and 192bit, or 256bit for that matter, is not that big anymore. There are already lots and lots of 256bit cards around and below $80. The HD3850, for instance is around there and it's comparatively A LOT more expensive to produce than the 9550GT will be. 9600GT is already well below $100, so yeah Nvidia wouldn't have any problem to sustitute 9600GT with that cheaper card if it performed similar. It wouldn't be the first time Nvidia does this, Ati has also made that hundreds of times. It's common bussiness.

Now THINK before posting again with ignorant responses, I'm getting tired of explaining everything.

EDIT: OH, and BTW nice try with those newegg links.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500062

9600GT at $80 after MIR:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125099

 

[btarunr]

Calm down people, just make your point and leave it at that.

 

[DarkMatter]

Calm down people, just make your point and leave it at that.

I'm just wondering if ignorant and ignorance have a very different and despective meaning or magnitude in english. I just want to say "lack of knowledge" when I say them and didn't find other word that engloved the whole idea. If they are despective and really offensive, then sorry. Sorry MrMilli for calling you ignorant, but you have to admit you lack the basic knowledge on many things. I'll try to find a better way to express it.

 

[MrMilli]

Nice stuff you write there but the fact is that 55nm is an optical shrink.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20070328080802.html

... has announced 55nm process technology, an optical shrink for its 65nm fabrication process, ... TSMC’s 55nm process technology is a 90% linear-shrink process from 65nm including I/O and analog circuits.

So you are right, G92 to G92b is an optical shrink. That's what 55nm is all about!

PS: your first link is a DDR2 9500GT!
That 9600GT will cost you $109. And if you get the rebate, it will become $79. That can take months. But rebates are temporary. They don't change retail prices on permanent basis.

 

[DarkMatter]

Nice stuff you write there but the fact is that 55nm is an optical shrink.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20070328080802.html

... has announced 55nm process technology, an optical shrink for its 65nm fabrication process, ... TSMC’s 55nm process technology is a 90% linear-shrink process from 65nm including I/O and analog circuits.

So you are right, G92 to G92b is an optical shrink. That's what 55nm is all about!

PS: your first link is a DDR2 9500GT!
That 9600GT will cost you $109. And if you get the rebate, it will become $79. That can take months. But rebates are temporary. They don't change retail prices on permanent basis.

Sorry man, but again you fail to demostrate any bit of intelligence. 55nm, the process, IS an optical shrink of 65nm, meaning there's no other changes like the compounds, chemicals used, etc. BUT is it that hard to understand that when you fab on a smaller process, you can get rid of many things that you need on the bigger one just to stabilize the chip, give it the proper voltage throughthe whole chip, etc?

No changes were made to G92b, they just took the chip and made photocopy that was 40% smaller. That's exactly why I said that G92B is just an optical shrink of G92. G92 on the other hand was much more than a shrink of the G80.

Anyway, forget about everything. It's like talking to a wall or a 3 years old kid who doesn't care about the lesson. :shadedshu

 

[MrMilli]

Yes Darkmatter, you know best. Actually you know even better than TSMC. How can i be that stupid. Jesus ...

Like i said in my previous post and it comes straight from TSMC's whitepaper:
TSMC’s 55nm process technology is a 90% linear-shrink process from 65nm including I/O and analog circuits.

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/529
I'll quote: TSMC's 55nm process is a 10% linear shrink of 65nm in each dimension, or 19% overall.
80nm was also a 19% shrink, but it did not affect analogue and I/O. This means the scaling wasn't as good as 55nm's in practice.

TSMC's white papers (or any other document for that matter) don't state anything about a reduction in repeaters, so please show me proof. And when we're talking about a reduction of only 19% then power distribution doesn't change that much, specially when both ATI and nVidia increase the frequency of their chips. In their situation power stays on the same level.

Don't mix up theory with facts. And will the admin be so kind and just close this thread. It's been enough.

 

[DarkMatter]

I'm going to cumpliment your wish by sending PM. We should have done that long time ago, anyway.

 

[zithe]

then explain to me one thing please, why does the R700 and RV770 preform more like a 64sp card than a 320sp card. The reason is only one of those ALU's is a complex shader, 64 of those are simple the rest arn't even related to shader work actully. And very few games use simple shaders because its harder to program for 2 types of shaders than just one.

R600/R670 you mean? Divide 320 by 5 and what do you get? 3870 has only 64 shaders. They each have 5 shader units. That explains what you're saying.

4870 has 800 'SPU' right? Divide 800 by 5. That's 160. It seems that if ATI decided to slap 300 shaders in their next card and uberclock them, it'd give a MASSIVE boost over the previous generation. Rambling..

This has all probably been said lol..

 

[DarkMatter]

As you can see except the G80 vs. G92 all of them are pretty close to the theroretical relation. The reason for G80 to fail to the "rule" is that G80 had the video decoding on a sister chip, so it's difficlt to know if the arrangement of the chip is similar. For instance the video decoding "chip" could be just sitting by the side of the GPU in G92 instead of being completely integrated, occupying much more space that would create a gap that could lead to the error. Still the relation is close enough to the theory to "prove" the numbers given at Beyond3D as usual difference were wrong. IMO what they say there applies better to CPUs, because the logic is much smaller in comparison to the rest of the chip.

G94 and RV770 were added to test if number of transistor to chip size relation was consistent enough within the same fab process, so that relation can then be added to the comparison between processes. IMO it's good enough to make a fair guesstimate, and make all other comparisons legitimate.

I'm going to try to make that chart bigger, but other chips are harder to find. Feel free to link sites where transistor count and size of other chips are available.

Cheers.