Tuesday, July 1st 2008
ATI Preparing 'Super RV770' to Challenge GeForce GTX 200 Series
The RV770 is perhaps the best thing that happened to AMD in a long while. But more than AMD, it's perhaps the best thing that happened to us, the consumers. But general product launches seem to be just the tip of the ice-berg. The new PCB's designed by ATI for RV770 cards are actually running at well below the clock speed they can support and there is every reason to believe that these cards will be challenging NVIDIA's very best.
The HD4870 PCB with two 6-pin power connectors can support a maximum TDP of 225W (2x 75W from the power connectors + 75W from the PCI-Express interface). While at stock parameters, the HD4870 will not consume over 170W, it implies that with a fair bit of binning for high-performing parts, there is a serious lot of room for overclocking way beyond what the ordinary HD4870 cards can take.
ATI is binning the parts to a lowest denominator required for good yields and a level of performance that reaches or sometimes overtakes the GeForce GTX 260. But this time around, the company developed an AIB/OEM-only product codenamed "Super RV770", which will be much more powerful.
These cards will come with pre-installed water-cooling and feature an 'unlocked BIOS'. Déjà Vu? Yes, it's perhaps the same parts that went into making the Diamond HD4870 XOC Unlocked Black Edition which was released earlier. The BIOS allows manufacturers to push the GPU core speed all the way up to 950 MHz, with the memory being able to scale up to 1200 MHz (effective: 4.80 GHz). With even better cooling such as a thermo-electric couple (TEC) cooler, you might be able to push it a little further. At 1200 MHz memory, the card attains a memory bandwidth of 150 GBps.
With Diamond Multimedia already having a product in the making, expect announcements from other ATI partners such as ASUS, Sapphire, HIS and GeCube.
Source:
DailyTech
The HD4870 PCB with two 6-pin power connectors can support a maximum TDP of 225W (2x 75W from the power connectors + 75W from the PCI-Express interface). While at stock parameters, the HD4870 will not consume over 170W, it implies that with a fair bit of binning for high-performing parts, there is a serious lot of room for overclocking way beyond what the ordinary HD4870 cards can take.
ATI is binning the parts to a lowest denominator required for good yields and a level of performance that reaches or sometimes overtakes the GeForce GTX 260. But this time around, the company developed an AIB/OEM-only product codenamed "Super RV770", which will be much more powerful.
These cards will come with pre-installed water-cooling and feature an 'unlocked BIOS'. Déjà Vu? Yes, it's perhaps the same parts that went into making the Diamond HD4870 XOC Unlocked Black Edition which was released earlier. The BIOS allows manufacturers to push the GPU core speed all the way up to 950 MHz, with the memory being able to scale up to 1200 MHz (effective: 4.80 GHz). With even better cooling such as a thermo-electric couple (TEC) cooler, you might be able to push it a little further. At 1200 MHz memory, the card attains a memory bandwidth of 150 GBps.
With Diamond Multimedia already having a product in the making, expect announcements from other ATI partners such as ASUS, Sapphire, HIS and GeCube.
56 Comments on ATI Preparing 'Super RV770' to Challenge GeForce GTX 200 Series
me wantie, that would really kick my 9800GTX in the nuts, and actually represent a viable upgrade.
I've yet to see ONE benchmark, real or synthetic, where th 4850/70 is scoring 250% x the 3870/50 units. So that means with 800/40 SPE/TMU (250% of 320/16) the poor buggers are not scaling and are handicapped elsewhere. "OVERCLOCKING" isnt really getting more performance out of the SPE/TMU but from overclocking the bottleneck area... whereever that bottleneck is.
But that is a serious waste of power and unnecessary heat. Attack the problem directly. Find and solve the bottleneck.
*** HUNT THE BOTTLENECK ***
1./ It's not SPE/TMU. We've go enough of those. In fact more than the GTX280
2./ It's not memory clocks. With GDDR5, we're faster then GTX280
3./ It's not PCIe1.0/2.0 interface. GTX280 can burst through
>> Drivers?
>> ROPs?
>> Local thread scheduler problems/cache/latency?
>> Memory bandwidth? Does ATI need to get back to 512-bit? Is there too much latency with 256-bit due to multiple read/write rather than single read/write
***ARCHITECTURE***Perhaps the *new* 800SPE and *new* 40 TMU are, in fact, less powerful PER UNIT than the old ones... due to instruction scheduling, data caching, and transistor-count optimisation issues. Getting 250% more units in only 33% more silicon will require some compromise somewhere. Perhaps that's the problem.
-Indybird
I will post some numbers later with my cpu running at 4.2ghz.
Just take a benchmark that is pretty much independent of CPU, like FurMark. QED
Next. Choose clocks for your GPU and CPU and stick with it. Now run Furmark with your GPU with memory clocks (main GPU clock same) increasing. Plot the results. Any difference? If there is, then there is a memory bottleneck. If it doesnt increase, or it is only marginal, then there is no memory bottleneck. (For furmark at least)
I suppose I'll wait a while before buying a 4870 now, wait to see what these better RV770's are capable of.
EDIT: No, I'm stupid, GDDR3. Man, I hate mornings.
From what I've picked up, ATi have decided to try using heaps of stream processing units, except they've had to downsize them so that they would fit on the die. They gave their designers a specific transistor count and size to work in, so the designers must'v had to cut back on the power of each unit.
If they made each SPU the same as the last generation, the die size would be MASSIVE!
I hope they get 45 nm chips out soon (better SPUs!), and not only ATI: c'mon AMD, where's some die shrinks??
however the fact remains that the chips are ,on average, twice as fast as their 38xx series predecessor. no matter how its done i guess it works.