RV770 is ATI 4800?

[Kougar]

Rather some nice surprises here on ATI's upcoming cards: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37025/135/

ATI 4870 gets a 1.05Ghz Core, 480 shaders, a needed doubling of TMUs (32 vs RV670's 16), and then "something" called GDDR5 @ 2200MHz. 55nm core @ ~150watts, so it doesn't sound like another R600 in the making...

If TGDaily has it right, then they lend a good deal of credence to this information: http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=255294

I looked up the white paper on Qimonda's GDDR5 but I don't know anything to make comparisons with it against GDDR4. Both use 1.5v and 2200Mhz is actually rather low for GDDR4, so I am not clear what the advantages of GDDR5 are supposed to be... it almost looks as if cost may be an advantage, but that is counter-intuitive. Although GDDR5 apparently uses a clock rate and then a secondary write clock rate, so in effect it has two (paper also mentioned something about a third) clock signals all at differing frequencies. http://www.qimonda-news.com/download/Qimonda_GDDR5_whitepaper.pdf

 

[Rob Williams]

Hmm, so that's where Theo went.

Those stats do look amazing, though, and if that's what we'll see on the production card, then NVIDIA better hope to have something astonishing up their sleeves. For AMD... that card cannot come soon enough, and now I am a bit excited for it ;-)

I doubt we'll see it until late Q3 though, so it's going to be a little bit of a wait.

As for GDDR5, I am a bit confused as well, but I assume it's just architecture refinements. What error-correction available on GDDR4? Improved efficiency might be the only benefit, so in all reality, it might be a bit faster clock-for-clock.

 

[Kougar]

Who's Theo?

Improved efficiency, and lower PCB production costs was the only thing I understood... but again, no way to know what is marketing filler and what is a genuine improvement over GDDR4.

I'm remaining pretty tempered in my excitement over RV770 just because of the R600 fiasco, but also if you notice the $299 price point of the top-end single core card... for a 1GB GDDR5 memory card, that's almost a discount isn't it? Makes me wonder if the price info is wrong, or maybe ATI knows GT200 will surpass what they've got and are simply looking to play the usual pricing game...

I'd love to see how fast RV770 can fold though...

 

[Rob Williams]

Theo used to be at The Inquirer but was rumored to have been let go after the entire RyderMark debacle. I'm not sure what really happened though, so I can't say anything.

$299 for that card would be truly incredible, but unlikely given the specs, unless there is something we are missing. I'm excited regardless. I want to see AMD kick some ass.

On an unrelated note, I finally got in an HD3850 256 MB and 512 MB card, so I'm looking forward to giving those a test and seeing how that extra memory is put to good use. Still working on finding a 1 GB card, though.

 

[THUMPer]

cant wait!

 

[Kougar]

Definite need for 512mb, is a pretty big difference with that card.

Not sure 1GB on RV770 will be any useful, not even 2x the power of G92 could give a GPU enough legs... might be interesting to see if GPU memory size affect folding speed though. With any luck, Stanford could have a GPU3 client available within the year.

 

[Rob Williams]

Definite need for 512mb, is a pretty big difference with that card.

Not sure 1GB on RV770 will be any useful, not even 2x the power of G92 could give a GPU enough legs... might be interesting to see if GPU memory size affect folding speed though. With any luck, Stanford could have a GPU3 client available within the year.

Sorry, I meant 1GB card for NVIDIA. I e-mailed one company, but didn't get a response. I think they are worried that I'd find out having 1GB on a GPU is useless, because their entire lineup features 1GB cards for each model.

I'll get one somehow.

 

[THUMPer]

yeah apparently the 4870 x2 is getting 2gb of gddr5.