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Chiphell
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This might be the first ATI reference card with a black PCB in a long time, if ever...
<3 my black pcb 8800 ultra
Beautiful!
Is there any word on the launch date?
Nvidia is screwed !
Well... it's a beast for sure...
Oh wow, that thing looks sexy...
I'm wondering if the performance will be the same with two 4870's in CF.
It really looks pretty.
Oh man that's nice. Should pack a punch too!
Me wants a black PCB on my 4870XT :(
It looks fantastic,but I hope that will work even better
nice design
they could make that pcb even shorter...
Benches we need, lots of them ;)
PLX chip in the middle = no performance gains over regular 4870 in CF just like the 3870x2
I mean, I could be totally wrong, but I for some reason am under the impression that crossfire-on-a-chip performs better than normal crossfire.
Correct me if I'm wrong, anyone.
Does that PLX chip act as a PCI-E bus or something of the sort? Kind of like emulating crossfire?
Jesus that PCB is a mess.
Well this makes it it sound like it won't be CF on a card:
CNET Article
Quote:
For ATI, the execution of this chip-ganging strategy is the key. And this is where ATI appears to have been successful. "The inter-processor communications. Getting that to work has been the trick. This is what ATI has done. They've come up with this stellar way of doing inter-processor communications so they can in fact get the scaling," according to Peddie.
So basically the card will not be CF on a board but will be a new interconnect between the GPU's. Also, it seems to suggest that the CrossFire connection was redone in the RV770 or at least for R700 since Peddie suggests that the CF connection is no longer at the very very end of the pipeline. Maybe that's why recent CF results of the 4800's show incredible scaling when it works? Or if as anandtech suggested and it was disabled on the RV770 cards, then it might be turned on for this and is different from the current 4800's.Quote:
AMD-ATI's upcoming R700 (rumored to be called the 4870 X2) two-chip graphics board will be the ultimate test of this strategy.
"It's a new proprietary inter-processor communication technology. If they put these two chips on one board and it does scale properly, then they have pulled off a coup," he said.
"When you gang up graphics chips (using the traditional Scalable Link Interface or CrossFire technologies) they roll off pretty fast. ("Roll off" implies that performance doesn't scale up well.) "So when you put two boards in, you don't get twice the performance but you (only) get one and a half. You put four boards in and you (only) get about 1.7, 1.8. What ATI is saying is that with two chips using (their) proprietary inter-bus, they will get 1.8 (the performance) with two chips. If that's true, you can expect to see four of them giving you something around 2.5."
Getting 2.5 times the performance from four boards would be a masterstroke for ATI.
The previous ATI dual-chip solution was very different, Peddie said. "The HD 3870 X2 was not a proprietary bus but a CrossFire connection. The CrossFire connection and the SLI connection are at the very, very end of the pipeline. Not the most efficient place to do an inter-processor communication. That's one of the reasons ATI has abandoned it."
Anyways, with the plethora of information of R700 that was just released it seems like ATI is pushing hard to get these cards out fast.
And quit thread crapping Sr7. This isn't the place for agendas.
Has the cooler been spotted anywhere?
I fraking KNEW it....
Anyone else notice the size of the PLX chip..? I think AMD leveraged some type of their hyper-transport technology with this newer PLX chip. It would confirm the hints AMD was mentioned a few months back about a new internal bridge.
Did I mention is was fraking black...?
nice.. black PCB;)