PtP
30-06-2004, 06:37 PM
BEFORE WE'VE GOT over the recent launch of products, the graphics companies are thinking about what's next, and whenare going to update their current graphic high end offers. This time they won't have Comdex to strut their stuff, but they will think of some nice event or make one to introduce the world's fastest stuff one more time.
ATI can not fulfill all their orders currently, as many of their partners said that there's too many back orders on those chips due to high demand and they simply can not make enough chips and cards.
Even if they haven’t supplied and sold as many as the market would have liked of the X800XT, PRO and XT Platinums, ATI is already thinking about the next chip. As we reported before, the new chip will be called R480 and it should be a faster version of R423 chip with similar marchitecture.
Some sources suggest that this new chip might feature Pixel shader 3.0 but I guess that would mean too much modification to the core and 60 million more transistors to add to the existing 160. In that case, ATI R480 would ironically end up at the same transistor count as Nvidia NV40.
ATI said before that 2005 is the time for shader model 3.0 and that would mean that the new R500 chip will have this amongst other nice features.
One good question is how much ATI can increase the speed of the chip as the Radeon X800XT Platinum works at 525MHz. We would like to remind you that R423 is 0.13µ (microns) and that this architecture stops at 600 MHz and even if the R480 is 0.11µ, which is not beyond the realms of possibility, it would still have speed limitations.
ATI has to response to Nvidia PCI-E SLI cards that will wipe out any of its scores. Where is the Sapphire Radeon 9800 MAXX - a dual 9800XT card that could give Nvidia SLI marchitecture a run for its money?
ATI can not fulfill all their orders currently, as many of their partners said that there's too many back orders on those chips due to high demand and they simply can not make enough chips and cards.
Even if they haven’t supplied and sold as many as the market would have liked of the X800XT, PRO and XT Platinums, ATI is already thinking about the next chip. As we reported before, the new chip will be called R480 and it should be a faster version of R423 chip with similar marchitecture.
Some sources suggest that this new chip might feature Pixel shader 3.0 but I guess that would mean too much modification to the core and 60 million more transistors to add to the existing 160. In that case, ATI R480 would ironically end up at the same transistor count as Nvidia NV40.
ATI said before that 2005 is the time for shader model 3.0 and that would mean that the new R500 chip will have this amongst other nice features.
One good question is how much ATI can increase the speed of the chip as the Radeon X800XT Platinum works at 525MHz. We would like to remind you that R423 is 0.13µ (microns) and that this architecture stops at 600 MHz and even if the R480 is 0.11µ, which is not beyond the realms of possibility, it would still have speed limitations.
ATI has to response to Nvidia PCI-E SLI cards that will wipe out any of its scores. Where is the Sapphire Radeon 9800 MAXX - a dual 9800XT card that could give Nvidia SLI marchitecture a run for its money?