Why the R600 was delayed

[sladesurfer]

Anandtech has some good info on why the R600 might have been delayed and a good comparison on what goes into the R600 and the G80...theres also benches, but most of you have already seen enough of those...

While AMD will tell us that R600 is not late and hasn't been delayed, this is simply because they never actually set a public date from which to be delayed. We all know that AMD would rather have seen their hardware hit the streets at or around the time Vista launched, or better yet, alongside G80. But the fact is that AMD had quite a few problems in getting R600 out the door.

While we couldn't really get the whole story from anyone, we heard bits and pieces here and there during our three day briefing event in Tunis, Tunisia. These conversations were short and scattered and not the kind of thing that it's easy to get a straight answer about when asking direct questions. Keeping that in mind, we do have some information and speculation about a few of the road bumps AMD faced with R600.

Apparently, the first spin of R600 silicon could only communicate over the debugging interface. While the upside is that the chip wasn't totally dead, this is not a good problem to have. We also overheard that a later revision of the hardware suffered from fragments getting stuck in pixel shaders. We even overheard one conversation where someone jokingly remarked that AMD should design hardware but leave the execution to NVIDIA.

In a wild bout of pure speculation on our part, we would have to guess about one other problem that popped up during R600's creation. It seems to us that AMD was unable to get their MSAA hardware to work properly and was forced to use shader hardware to handle MSAA rather than go back for yet another silicon revision. Please know that this is not a confirmed fact, but just an educated guess

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2988&p=1

[Shintai]

Sounds like RD600 all over...

[theteamaqua]

lol RD600 turn out to be such a flop ... the only good thing about it is the unsync fsb and dram feature. other than that .. 965/680i can dopretty much everything it does

[XSAlliN]

R600 was/is a fake monster, it's same like the ones made from paper and instead of showing his high power in performance (as if it could), it show it it in power consumption, this card was a dream for ATi fans, to bad it stayed at the phase of a dream, didn't get materialized in a real life product, guess we were waiting for Elvis which turned up to be a fake clone. :stick:

PS.Elvis is dead, same as ATi right now.

[sladesurfer]

We even overheard one conversation where someone jokingly remarked that AMD should design hardware but leave the execution to NVIDIA.

:lol2:

[Vassili]

Uhm RD600 and R600 are 2 different things. :)

RD600 = ATI chipset for Intel-cpu's
R600 = ATI HD 2900

[theteamaqua]

yeah i know i was replying to shintai's statement about RD600

[Shintai]

Uhm RD600 and R600 are 2 different things. :)

RD600 = ATI chipset for Intel-cpu's
R600 = ATI HD 2900

Both massively delayed and overhyped.

[DamienKC]

Uhm RD600 and R600 are 2 different things. :)

RD600 = ATI chipset for Intel-cpu's
R600 = ATI HD 2900

they know, they were talking about motherboards :)

also the title is kind of misleading, but anything's possible :o

[Face]

TG Daily: Let’s get right to it. The R600 arrives about six months late. What is the story behind this delay?

Rick Bergman: There are a couple of reasons. The first reason is that there were design issues that needed to be resolved. And then, later, we decided to retarget the product at a very attractive price point

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32021/136/

Not a big deal, since we knew it all along, but at least they admit it themselves now.

[v_rr]

Both massively delayed and overhyped.

Both are good products. Only fanboys have interest on those things by hyping then or criticize them, so the selling rate do not depend on what fanboys says but in what product offer.

[theteamaqua]

well i dont know how much people hyped R600 ... but some did say that its going to be the best DX10 card and such with scalar vector something like that .... and i dont visit the video card forum often

but i do know a lot about hype over RD600 ... like i said b4 there were tons and tons of thread over at the intel section like "RD600 the golden board" , "RD600 will u get it?" .... those thread makes me sick ...

as for R600 HD2900XT ... AMD figure it cant compete with GTX performance wise (yes future driver will increase performance ) so they lower it to $399 to be more competitive, and i will say that for $399 its quite a good card, good performance/price ratio.. certainly better than the Ultra with Ultra high price

[Gambit_2K]

lol RD600 turn out to be such a flop ... the only good thing about it is the unsync fsb and dram feature. other than that .. 965/680i can dopretty much everything it does

If the RD600 would have been on time it would have lived up to the hype (main competitor the would not have been 680i). It's still a really cool (as in cold) chipset that can overclock really really well both when it comes to CPU and memory. DFI didn't do all that good of a job on it though.

The R600 still wouldn't have been all that great if it had been on time. nVidia would still have run circles around it I think. So there is a difference when it comes to "what could have been".

[cantankerous]

That whole issue with AA being done on Shaders instead of a dedicated part of the card really bothers me. I think that is what is single handedly destroying this cards performance. This is something that will never be fixed through software either as this is a hardware issue.

[Scimitar]

Hopefully when they respin the card on the 65nm process for the R650 they are able to fix that AA issue. Also, they need to fix their AF quality, not sure if this is driver related or in the hardware.

[Frank M]

R600 was/is a fake monster,

I'd rather say it's a prematurely born monster.
Seeing the problems it has, I'd say it was still rushed to market despite the
whole delay. Once they refine it in the next complete revision (R650) and if
that performs according to its potential, it will be a monster card.

[kemist]

That whole issue with AA being done on Shaders instead of a dedicated part of the card really bothers me. I think that is what is single handedly destroying this cards performance. This is something that will never be fixed through software either as this is a hardware issue.

The majority of normal (fully color compressed) box AA work still goes through the ROPs, which is why you see a huge hit when the tent filters are turned on (++ work that goes through the ALUs).

I really think that the tests where 2900xt is scoring right up there with 8800gtx are probably going to be more representative of its true capability. Right now everything is pointing to extremely immature compiler/drivers. Based on everything i have read the compiler is going to take a lot of work to tune for all the different scenarios that are possible, and the ringbus is extremely finnicky with regards to tuning for performance (Anyone remember the huge gains in Doom3 with R520 that was attributed to tuning the ringbus?). Given a few months i think it will probably slot in very nicely between the gtx and the gts, and be much closer to the gtx overall.

This is just my opinion, and i havent put my money where my mouth is ;)

[XSAlliN]

I'd rather say it's a prematurely born monster.
Seeing the problems it has, I'd say it was still rushed to market despite the
whole delay. Once they refine it in the next complete revision (R650) and if
that performs according to its potential, it will be a monster card.

A 7 month late rush (I fought rush is something you do quick). :D

[Gambit_2K]

A 7 month late rush (I fought rush is something you do quick). :D

The dog over at Ati ate the blueprints :p

[Haltech]

My concern is how many patches will someone need to get their 2900 to work correctly with games.. This happened before to the Radeon line.

[revenant]

it sort of a freakin joke that the 8800GTX/GTS has been out for many months now, racking up sales for Nvidia, and the card ATI touted to be the 8800 killer arrives 7 or 8 months after the 8800 release.. ? and it's, well.. no what we were expecting.. it runs extremely hot, comsumes a lot of power, and doesn't out perform the competition the way it was supposed to.. I can't see how this can be looked at in any other light excecpt for a failure.. unless they pull some magic drivers out of their sleeves..

edit: it's really sad imo.. all of the time, energy, and resources that went into the R600 production to have it fall short of the mark like this.. oye. I hope better drivers will help the performance.. only time will tell.. but being this late to the game they should have had their sh*t toegther more than this.. they should also have known this from experience with their other late releases.

[perkam]

it sort of a freakin joke that the 8800GTX/GTS has been out for many months now, racking up sales for Nvidia, and the card ATI touted to be the 8800 killer arrives 7 or 8 months after the 8800 release.. ? and it's, well.. no what we were expecting.. it runs extremely hot, comsumes a lot of power, and doesn't out perform the competition the way it was supposed to.. I can't see how this can be looked at in any other light excecpt for a failure.. unless they pull some magic drivers out of their sleeves..

edit: it's really sad imo.. all of the time, energy, and resources that went into the R600 production to have it fall short of the mark like this.. oye. I hope better drivers will help the performance.. only time will tell.. but being this late to the game they should have had their sh*t toegther more than this.. they should also have known this from experience with their other late releases.The card AMD will tout as the 8800 killer is coming q3...aka R650.

Yes its rather sad it's coming after so long, but so is k10.

Frankly, Daamit doesn't care as long as it has r600 line up and some sort of k10 line up available for ppl to buy before dec 31st 2007.

That way they can rack up sales in first quarter next year and go from $15 to $18 in a matter of weeks in April next year.

Perkam

[Zytek_Fan]

R650 better be a complete redesign...or at least a way better product

[Shintai]

R650 could easily be countered and beaten by a 65nm G80. Remember current G80 is 90nm and R600 is 80nm. It can only be worse unless they fix quite a few things in HW.

[Plywood99]

I think Nordic Hardware nailed the real reason for the delay. Leakage...


Ply

[DilTech]

The card AMD will tout as the 8800 killer is coming q3...aka R650.

Yes its rather sad it's coming after so long, but so is k10.

Frankly, Daamit doesn't care as long as it has r600 line up and some sort of k10 line up available for ppl to buy before dec 31st 2007.

That way they can rack up sales in first quarter next year and go from $15 to $18 in a matter of weeks in April next year.

Perkam

Unfortunately, it's not likely the R650 will be against the 8800...There's bigger fish in the sea, as been said a few times by a few people here now.

[theteamaqua]

Unfortunately, it's not likely the R650 will be against the 8800...There's bigger fish in the sea, as been said a few times by a few people here now.

yes by the time HD2950 R650 is released ... nv will have either 8900 or 9800 GTX .... like i said b4 nv gets their product out fast

[Zytek_Fan]

yes by the time HD2950 R650 is released ... nv will have either 8900 or 9800 GTX .... like i said b4 nv gets their product out fast

Yeah and by the Barcelona will be out...so new NVIDIA chipset for AMD? :D

[theteamaqua]

u know thats interesting .. i heard that AMD will allow intel's X38 to do CF ... wonder how nv chipset for AMD will turn out .. nforce 780i

the main reason AMD let that happen is b/c GPU costs a lot ... so they might actually make more money if u chosoe to do intel CPU/board + AMD CF , then AMD CPU + nv GPU

i doubt AMD will let nv do that , but we shall see

intel X38 + R600 CF was my plan , and thats pretty much shattered ... Intel + nv usually takes a long time ... it took nv about 5 months after the launch of conroe to get their 1st conroe SLI board out ....

what to do now ...

[c.freak]

ATI have to realize that R650 has to be something awesome and bonecrushing to measure up to nv's next line of gfx's, can they make that in time (aug-sept).. According to fudzilla they *say* there's gona be some major adjustments along the GPU-clock and the texture-architecture.

Im really looking forward to this one IF it can manage to go side by nv's gtx,ultra. Maybe the energy-consumtion won't be so bad :rolleyes:

*I just hope they won't screw up the release* Maybe they've learned from last, or..

[Jimmer411]

From what Ive seen, without the wide and narrow tent settings in the AA the image quality (AF) between the GTX and XT are the same.


The overclocking potential is exciting me tho, Ive never seen that much headroom on a higher end card on traditional cooling (air/water).

[thephenom]

u know thats interesting .. i heard that AMD will allow intel's X38 to do CF ... wonder how nv chipset for AMD will turn out .. nforce 780i

the main reason AMD let that happen is b/c GPU costs a lot ... so they might actually make more money if u chosoe to do intel CPU/board + AMD CF , then AMD CPU + nv GPU

i doubt AMD will let nv do that , but we shall see
The whole Intel with CF thing was all pre-merger stuff anyway. AMD/ATI would be stupid if they shut themselves out of a high-end multi-GPU on the Intel Platform especially since they don't have any Intel chipset anymore (which has 70-80% of the market share). NV doesn't allow SLI on Intel chipset for 1 reason, to boost sales to their chipset. CF is still the only "open" platform on the market. While we might not see it on retail, I read somewhere that Dell has CF running on nForce chipset on some of their systems. Also, AMD/ATI already allowed CF on the P35, so we can expect the same for X38, IMO, more choices, the better (even when R600 seems to be a flop, but let's see what drivers can do a few months down the road). :D

What would be interesting to see is how ATI/AMD chipset will fare against the NV chipset now that the ex-ATI chipset folks can toss in more optimization for the CPU. :D

[Sentential]

R650 could easily be countered and beaten by a 65nm G80. Remember current G80 is 90nm and R600 is 80nm. It can only be worse unless they fix quite a few things in HW.
To me the most frightening thing about the G80 design is that just about all of its functions are a multiple of the number of shaders it has.

Quite litererly all nVidia has to do is add XX number of shaders to the G80 and not only would they get atleast a 512bit card by default because of how its designed, but it would rip ATi a new one in terms of peformance..... they dont even *have* to redesign the card, toss a few more shaders and they're good to go.

The fact that nVidia's G80 shaders can run over 1.5ghz (R600 = 700mhz), have fewer of them (little less than 1/2), *AND* run with a lower power tdp is really impressive. I wouldnt be at all suprised if they have a working G90 design based on something like that up and running today. They could so much as breathe and obliterate the R650 if they wanted to and on the cheap at that.

[XSAlliN]

ATi's dead, this is AMD's policy based on a tight budget, spending billions on investments and 10x less on graphic chips (technology/production).

[JuanFlaiter]

u know thats interesting .. i heard that AMD will allow intel's X38 to do CF ... wonder how nv chipset for AMD will turn out .. nforce 780i

NV chipsets for AMD end in a... it would be 780a (680a = 4x4 chipset). Intel chipsets end in i (680i). :up:

[perkam]

Unfortunately, it's not likely the R650 will be against the 8800...There's bigger fish in the sea, as been said a few times by a few people here now.Perhaps you're right, but I'm under the impression that the G90/G100 is q1 08 while the R650 is Q3 07.

Knowing ATI and Nvidia, that basically means they'll both come out in Q4 07 :lol:

Perkam

[eXceededgoku]

Perhaps you're right, but I'm under the impression that the G90/G100 is q1 08 while the R650 is Q3 07.

Knowing ATI and Nvidia, that basically means they'll both come out in Q4 07 :lol:

Perkam

bit optimistic!? Erm more like:
ATI R650 - late Q1 2008
Nvidia G90/100 - as soon as ATI reveals a competitive card