Some more R600 information

[schtuga]

AMD's recent takeover of ATI may have signicant long-term benfits for both but, right now, it doesn't seem to have done anything for ATI's ability to produce state-of-the-art graphic processors in a timely fashion.

While trawling the night markets in Old Taipei with the HEXUS Dragon Tour 2006, ol' Willy Deeplung tells us he heard word on the street about ATI's promised R600 part - not only how late it now is but also some of the issues there have been along this yellow brick road.

As many of you know, ATI R600 should be with us now. ATI's AIB manufacturing partners are gagging for it. The biggest trouble they're having is that there are no GPUs floating around. None.

Most makers are feeling very much in the dark over this one, so we thought we'd update you by sharing all of the little information we've been able to gather.

R600 has had several challenges, principally over power and cooling.

ATI has looked at water-cooling and traditional air cooling. But, the speed of the processor and its resultant heat output have meant that ATI also had to consider more complex hi-tech solutions.

So, the company turned to NanoFoil cooling technology. This, as best we can understand, works by having ultra-thin nanolayers of aluminium and nickel that can be kicked into life by heat, electricity or mechanical or optical stimulation, causing a reaction that gives off heat in a controlled fashion.

But NanoFoil is a solution that's been looking for a problem since the turn of 2003, and hasn't as far as we known, had any real-life use for cooling GPUs, CPUs or anything similar.

At the heart of the cooling problem, though, is the R600's power requirements. These are nothing short of laughable at the moment
With the clock speeds the company's looking to deploy, R600's requirements seem like they're going to outpace those of NVIDIA Quad parts. Cooling issues only make things worse and it's still unclear what steps ATI can take to solve these dual problems.

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7436

What did we learn? Unfortunately, some of the more exciting items are under NDA until CES but we did pick up a few tidbits here and there. It appears the AMD/ATI R600 graphics cards are still on schedule for an early Q1 2007 launch and should provide some very serious competition to the GeForce 8800 series. However, all of the expected benefits and performance improvements of this release will also bring some serious power requirements. We heard power consumption numbers hovering around 430~450W for the high-end CrossFire setup while under full load. Those are power requirements just for the cards according to our sources who said the first silicon spins actually consumed even more power. What the final numbers will be is anyone's guess but be prepared to start looking at 800W+ power supplies in the near future if you want to run extreme performance GPU configurations.

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2887

no chips floating around yet,I guess that would explain the lack of leaked benches we've been hoping for

 

[3deckWizard]

i presume people have seen this?


What did we learn? Unfortunately, some of the more exciting items are under NDA until CES but we did pick up a few tidbits here and there. It appears the AMD/ATI R600 graphics cards are still on schedule for an early Q1 2007 launch and should provide some very serious competition to the GeForce 8800 series. However, all of the expected benefits and performance improvements of this release will also bring some serious power requirements. We heard power consumption numbers hovering around 430~450W for the high-end CrossFire setup while under full load. Those are power requirements just for the cards according to our sources who said the first silicon spins actually consumed even more power. What the final numbers will be is anyone's guess but be prepared to start looking at 800W+ power supplies in the near future if you want to run extreme performance GPU configurations.

from anand's pre-CES write up

whats the 8800's power draw again? roughly the same?

 

[3deckWizard]

Originally posted by: Hyperlite

Originally posted by: Matt2

Can you imagine an 800mhz 8800GTX?

Text

he went through all that effort to bump up a 3dmark 01 score?

 

[3deckWizard]

Originally posted by: schtuga

Originally posted by: evolucion8

Originally posted by: KeithTalent

Originally posted by: GNStudios
when will it launch? does anyone know?

ATI R600 GPU is expected to be released on January 20th on an 80nm process. The R600 is the successor to the R580 core and will be fully DirectX 10 compliant, utilising a Unified Shader Model architecture. Current rumours suggest that R600 will feature 64 Shader pipelines (processing both vertices and pixels) with 32 TMUs and 32 ROPs running at a clock speed of around 800Mhz. R600 is expected to interface to 512MB of 2Ghz+ GDDR4 Memory over a 512-bit interface. R600 is reported to consume up to 250W (twice that of R580) and may require two PCI Express power connectors.

Link

Damn, with it's only 64 madd shaders was able to outperform the G80, now with 8 more rops and tmu, running at 800mhz, :Q

You have benches? Where does it say it's faster? Where does it say what type of pipelines? scalar, vec3, vec4?

quote--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In regards to R600's architecture...I've heard it's going to use vec4's...is that necessarily going to be less efficient than nvidia's scalar design?


reply

if it can be be split up into vec 2 + vec 2 or other combinations it might end up just as effecient. Hard to say at this point

ROP's arent THAT critical anyway are they? i remember NV's 6600GT quashed the X600/X700 despite it only having 4 ROPs when the X700 had 8?

with pixels being in the pixel processing stage for so long, having lots of ROP's isnt a necessity, especially if you are good at managing them

 

[3deckWizard]

Originally posted by: thilan29

Originally posted by: josh6079

I think they're keeping you on the edge of your seat BFG.

If that is really what they're doing then Nvidia has the worst business practice out of any GPU vendor. To make their early adopters pay a premium to do nothing but deal with troubleshooting and frustration just so they can one-up the competition several months down the road isn't something I think enthusiasts appreciate.

QFT. If that IS what they did then I will have learned my lesson. I won't be a guinea pig next time....although it was pretty exciting to have my 8800GTS a day after it launched.

its nothing new

look at the 360, people are still paying to beta test that thing, including me.

90 day warranty for a £300 piece of equipment is an utter joke. MS were covering their asses for sure, they new full well alot of units werent going to last so having a short warranty time gets them out of spending even more money on repairs to consoles that they already lost £££ on

i think electronics companies will continue to have this "paying customer beta testing"

 

[imported_RedStar]

"90 day warranty for a £300 piece of equipment is an utter joke. MS were covering their asses for sure, they new full well alot of units werent going to last so having a short warranty time gets them out of spending even more money on repairs to consoles that they already lost £££ on"

if that were true ...MS would not have bothered to repair (or refund repair costs)--for FREE-- any consoles malfunctioning before last jan 1st. MS does indicate that a certain batch of intial consoles did have a higher defective rate than normal for electronics.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6158147.html

Now if you want more than 90 days ...you can always get the extended warranty.

Dilution of the electronics warranty, across the whole field, has been ongoing for a couple of years now (although. i hear that in Europe ...there is a law that a warranty must be at least 1 year. this is an enlightened position

 

[3deckWizard]

Originally posted by: RedStar
"90 day warranty for a £300 piece of equipment is an utter joke. MS were covering their asses for sure, they new full well alot of units werent going to last so having a short warranty time gets them out of spending even more money on repairs to consoles that they already lost £££ on"

if that were true ...MS would not have bothered to repair (or refund repair costs)--for FREE-- any consoles malfunctioning before last jan 1st. MS does indicate that a certain batch of intial consoles did have a higher defective rate than normal for electronics.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6158147.html

Now if you want more than 90 days ...you can always get the extended warranty.

Dilution of the electronics warranty, across the whole field, has been ongoing for a couple of years now (although. i hear that in Europe ...there is a law that a warranty must be at least 1 year. this is an elightened position

i live in the UK and 360 warranty is 90 days, least thats what the woman on the tech support phone was telling me when mine started chewing discs

thankfully i remedied it myself

i hate extended warranties and RPP's most of the time they are just selling you fresh air and its annoying. its sod's law that you wont need it if you pay for it.

and after dropping £300.... i dont expect to have to pay further just to make sure i get more than 90 days out of it.

but wasnt there a bit of an uproar about how many 360's were dying? they were prompted to come up with that solution because of the sheer number of failures. im pretty sure they didnt plan on it.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: Genx87


What???? Apoppin assured us the R600 would consume the same as the G80.
The G80 consumes ~20 watts more than the R580 at load. This thing is going to consume about 100+ more watts at load.

What????
... i did?
:Q


where did i "assure" anyone?



... and we still don't know for sure about r600 ... "up to 250w" is the same PREspeculation about the 8800GTX power usage.

 

[Creig]

Originally posted by: schtuga
430~450W for the high-end CrossFire setup while under full load.

430~450/2 = 215~225 watts for a single R600 under full load. That doesn't sound too outrageous.

Originally posted by: schtuga
no chips floating around yet,I guess that would explain the lack of leaked benches we've been hoping for

????

R600 chips floating around

Originally posted by: schtuga
R600 has had several challenges, principally over power and cooling.

ATI has looked at water-cooling and traditional air cooling. But, the speed of the processor and its resultant heat output have meant that ATI also had to consider more complex hi-tech solutions.

So, the company turned to NanoFoil cooling technology. This, as best we can understand, works by having ultra-thin nanolayers of aluminium and nickel that can be kicked into life by heat, electricity or mechanical or optical stimulation, causing a reaction that gives off heat in a controlled fashion.

But NanoFoil is a solution that's been looking for a problem since the turn of 2003, and hasn't as far as we known, had any real-life use for cooling GPUs, CPUs or anything similar.

NanoFoil Technology page

RNT?s patented NanoFoil® is a multilayer foil which enables reaction initiation (for propellant ignition, flares and fuses) and joining of dissimilar materials, making such applications predictable, controllable and far more affordable. When activated by a small pulse of local energy from electrical, optical or thermal sources, the foil precisely delivers localized heat up to temperatures of 2000°C in fractions (thousandths) of a second.

Sounds like Hexus is a bit confused. From what I read, NanoFoil is used for high temperature bonding of similiar and dissimiliar materials. It has nothing to do with cooling unless their process is going to be used to attach cooling fins to heatsink bases. Even then, it's nothing that will revolutionize GPU cooling.



The G80 was kept under pretty tight wraps until launch so there's no reason to expect R600 security to be any less. We may not see any benchmarks until closer to the launch date.

 

[imported_RedStar]

"430~450/2 = 215~225 watts for a single R600 under full load. That doesn't sound too outrageous"

it does seem a bit high when the stated peak of the 8800 gtx is 160 W. But compared to the previous 300 W and external power supply rumours ...then ya, not so outrageous

 

[Creig]

Originally posted by: RedStar
"430~450/2 = 215~225 watts for a single R600 under full load. That doesn't sound too outrageous"

it does seem a bit high when the stated peak of the 8800 gtx is 160 W. But compared to the previous 300 W and external power supply rumours ...then ya, not so outrageous

Yes, I was comparing 215-225 to the previous 300 watt claims. I was also remembering that the G80 had similiar numbers floating around before it was launched. So I guess we won't know for sure until reviewers can publish some hard results.