ATI R600 Rumor Mill

by Sean Pelletier — Wednesday, November 15, 2006, 09:23 AM EDT

The Rumor Mill is working hard over at The Inquirer as they report that ATI's next-generation R600 GPU faced yet another bug which helped attribute to the lengthy delay to market. Aside from the initial bug which locked core frequencies at a ceiling of 500MHz, the second issue found disabled Multi-Sampled Anti-Aliasing (MSAA). Regardless, A1-variants of the core will have at least one of the major bugs ironed-out with a likely A2-stepping being the version which will be released to market and (ideally) bug-free. In either case, some new information is also making itself known with regards to the R600 architecture. Supposedly, the RingBus configuration remains though the external memory controller is now a true 512-bit design. In addition, rumors suggest we'll see 16 ROP's as well as 64 SIMD shader units. One thing is certain, it will be interesting to see how ATI's approach to DX10 will compare with NVIDIA's newly released GeForce 8800 series of GPU's.

Since R600 SIMD Shader can calculate the result of four scalar units, it yields with scalar performance of 256 units - while Nvidia comes with 128 "real" scalar units. We are heading for very interesting results in DX10 performance, since game developers expect that NV stuff will be faster in simple instrucions and R600 will excel in complex shader arena. In a way, you could compare R600 and G80 as Athlon XP versus Pentium 4 - one was doing more work in a single clock, while the other was using higher clock speed to achieve equal performance.

Tags: ATI, Rumor, R600

ATI R600 Rumor Mill

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