Ati's answer to nVidia's G70 comes on 26th July?

[BvB123]

About one month after nVidia's upcoming presentation of the G70, ATI will introduce its new R520 GPU on July 26, 2005. Until now there is less information available about it, compared to the G70. However, some facts are already certain. The chip will have 32 physical pixel processing pipelines, but only 24 of them will be active initially. Perhaps a measure to be able to compete against future versions of nVidia's G70 GPU.
The R520 will be produced in a 90nm process and will have 300 to 350 million transistors.
In addition, it supports pixel shader 3.0 and H.264 hardware acceleration, a video-compression
standard.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[gR3iF]

finally prices of x800/x850 will drop

 

[djbbenn]

When you say only 24 out of the 32 will be active, do you mean they wont have a version out for a while with all pipes enabled? So will will have to wait longer to get the full power of the R520. But its still going to be sweet.

-Dan

 

[zAAm]

Maybe you can hardmod it to enable all 32?! (Although I doubt it...) Haha

 

[djbbenn]

I wonder if ATI caught on to people modding their cards...knowing companies the way they are, they'll probably try to stop people. But then there will be people who find a way around it.

-Dan

 

[wazzledoozle]

ATI did a pretty good job stopping modding to higher level cards with the X800 series, no one card can be flashed to another for whatever reasons (Except X800 Pro vivo)

 

[djbbenn]

Ya but theres also hardmods to get those extra pipes on some cards...for those daring enought.

-Dan

 

[15th Warlock]

Guess Ati is trying to get higher yields on intial production runs of the new GPU. So even if there's a way to enable those pipelines, I bet in most cases the pipelines will be broken, being the first time such complex GPUs are being made.
So no unified pixel/vector pipeline architecture huh? Guess the Xbox360 GPU is a completely different beast, not related in anyway whatsoever with the R5X0 series... interesting.

 

[15th Warlock]

Check this out:

Penstar Systems has an new editorial up which takes a look at ATI and the problems they may be having with R520 production. A problem cited in the article is that R520 is supposed to have 32 pipes, but a majority of the production units are only turning up with 16 working pipes:

It has been widely commented on that TSMC's 90 nm Low-K process is actually quite robust, and the yields and bins are better than expected with such a new and complex process. So if ATI's R520 taped out so long ago, and TSMC's process is running at a higher efficiency than expected for this time frame, where are the R520 parts? The information I have received paints a rather grim picture for ATI. Add to that the recent information released by ATI about the lower than expected revenues due to product pressure and poor yields and packaging problems, things are not as happy as they should be.

Source

So this confirms what I just posted above, Ati already is having problems with the yields of this new GPU, chances are we will see very low numbers of top of the line cards based on the R5X0 core, and lots of mid level cards with only 16 working pipelines!

 

[wazzledoozle]

Check this out:



Source

So this confirms what I just posted above, Ati already is having problems with the yields of this new GPU, chances are we will see very low numbers of top of the line cards based on the R5X0 core, and lots of mid level cards with only 16 working pipelines!

only, LOL

I hope ATI doesnt get greedy price-wise. I really need a video card upgrade and dont have much money.

 

[djbbenn]

I know what you mean there. It should push the prices of the X850's and so on down too.

-Dan

 

[15th Warlock]

only, LOL

I know 16 pipelines sounds like a lot right now, but imagine what will happen 2 months from now, if the majority of new Ati cards have 16 pipelines only, and will be facing the new G70 cards from nVidia with 24 pipelines. (though we don't know yet if there'll be a 16 pipeline version of the G70...)
It could spell a lot of trouble for Ati to be in such a position...

 

[wazzledoozle]

Well no one knows how well it is going for nvidia, either.