Sunday, February 4th 2007
R600, RV610, and RV630 details unveiled
The R6x0 series will be paper-launched at CeBIT this year, though we will still have to wait until roughly March before seeing anything, so that we don't see any shortages. The latest details of the R6x0 family, according to our friends at VR-Zone:
- The R600 will be available as previously stated. It will come with 64 unified shaders (32 ROP's?), clocked at 814MHz. It should perform 2.5 to 8 times better than the current R580, depending on the application.
- The RV610 will be AMD's entry-level DirectX10 entry. It will ship in May. It will have an 8 layer PCB, digital PWM's, will be manufactured on a 65nm process, and support up to 256MB of 64 bit DDR2.
- The RV630 will be AMD's mid-level DirectX10 entry. It will ship with the RV610. It will be on a 65nm process, use "bi-directional PWM for GPU and uni-directional PWM for memories", and have up to 2x256MB (wonder why they don't call it 512MB) GDDR4.
53 Comments on R600, RV610, and RV630 details unveiled
To all the noobs screaming "OMGz ONLI 64 SHADERZ?! NV HAS 128 LOL! 8600 WILL HAV 64! OMGZ LOL PWNT!"
Realize it said 64 vec4 shaders. Vec4 shaders are a more advanced shader design than the design in G80, which uses 128 scalar shaders.
Scalar shaders can do one shader operation per cycle, vec4 can do a maximum of 4 operations.
This means that theoretically the R600 could be as powerful as having 256 G80 shaders --BUT -- not necessarily. The problem for ATI is that scalar shaders are so simple they are always at 100% usage (meaning no wasted power in the G80), but their R600's vec4 shaders are more complex -- 100% usage is very hard to achieve, they'd be lucky to get 80%.
Expect both cards to be within 20% of each other, maybe more in some, less in others...
My money is on R600 for DX10 performance, maybe a tie in DX9. This has yet to be seen however..
So, remembering that 64vec 4 = ~256 scalar shaders (NV = 128 scalar), plus the fact that R600 is 512-bit external memory bus w/ gigabit (1024bit) internal ringbus (NV = 384-bit internal/external), plus higher core and mem clocks at rumoured 800/1100 (NV = 575/900)... don't count ATI/AMD out of the game yet...