Wednesday, June 21, 2006

ATI's 80nm Roadmap Leaked — Cormac @ 17:17 

Thanks to the leaked GeÑube's production roadmap the source obtained information on the first ATI GPUs to be made using 80nm process technology.

The new RV560 and RV570 chips will be designed similarly to RV530, 12 pixel pipelines. The only essential difference will be the built-in Compositing Engine responsible for image output in CrossFire configurations. This will make CrossFire master cards obsolete, as usual accelerators will be able to work together.

Besides the aforementioned mid-end products, we are to witness the budget series update. ATI will separate its RV515 (Radeon X1300) family into two based on memory bus width. Customers will be offered 128-bit RV516 (TSMC) and 64-bit RV505CE (UMC). Both will feature 4 pixel and 2 vertex pipelines.

And now for the dessert. According to GeCube's roadmap, RV570-based cards will outperform Radeon X1800XT and GeForce 7800GT. Given the amount of pipelines of the latter, it becomes clear that 80nm novelties will have very high clock rates, and, perhaps, 256-bit memory bus. Otherwise they won't be able to outperform ATI's recent flagships at affordable prices.

Source: HKEPC