a bit too small for RV870, do you think ? :confused:
It's probably safe to say that the shader area is one of the four rectangle-ish quadrants. Maybe the upper right quadrant as it looks the biggest? Or maybe two quadrants contain shader cores? Looks like some kind of bus interface on the left side at the bottom. The die shots seem to suggest that evergreen is much more than a tweaked and shrunk RV770.
Wouldn't be surprised if it was 'only' 180 mm^2, RV670 wasn't much bigger than that. This chip will probably have a higher transistor density than RV740, so my guess would be that it will have around 1,2 Billion transistors at it's disposal. Or if we are really lucky and the previous rumors are true, then this might even have 1,4 Billion transistor, but that seem pretty much impossible in such a small space. Now we only need to figure out how much DX11 cost to implement and then we can guesstimate how many units this chip has. It may actually even clock better than the RV790, so clocks might even be higher.
Not to mention that RV670 to RV770 saw a 38% increase in die size, but 2.5x more shaders and TMUs. Well, RV740 at 137mm^2 to this at 180ish mm^2 is roughly 30% more... and 2.5x 640 shaders is 1600, so putting 1200 probably isn't out of reach. Frankly, I don't think we have a clue at all what this chip is going to have
^^^This...but we can always speculate, can't we?...:)Quote:
Frankly, I don't think we have a clue at all what this chip is going to have
Whatever the specifics, there 2 things certain.
1> I will have better performance than 4890
2> AMDs margins will be much better with that diesize
And 2 things are uncertain.
1> Can the X2 derivative handle GT300?
2> Can this die scale down for the "5850", or will we see another chip there?
I would'nt mind if this card ends up being an updated rv790, and not the full specced rv870. Clues pointing to die size, suggests amd are concentrating on energy consumption this time around. Evergreen code name also points in that direction....but just my thoughts.
I think Shintai sole purpose is to antagonize everyone.
what are you expectations on its idle power saving features? think it will be better than the 4000 series or possibly better than the 3000 series?
That sounds entirely reasonable and I expect no less myself. Hopefully they deliver.
As far as power consumption goes, ATI could do a tad better with their idle ( hopefully they've managed to get their GDDR5 controllers to behave better ) but the load on the 4870 was reasonable I felt. Given most people leave their systems on unattended for extended peroids ( waste of power I know...:rolleyes:) the lower the idle usage the better.
I think CJ could be right with this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by CJ
In other words, you can't really read much from the pictures of that wafer. CJ seems to be properly informed most of the time when it comes to this kind of stuff.
He also mentioned that NVIDIA won't be launching any DX11 hardware in 2009, although he said he's looking for some more confirmation regarding this. Would be good for ATI, but not for the consumer.
i think hes right about the flipped wafer, there just isnt a good reason for creating this 2x2 square design. the reflections are too homogenous, as if it were 4 cache/memory parts or something. wasnt that the main requirement for "free AA" we keep hearing about now and then? so we cant be shure whats the actual shader area size is as we arent seeing it
doesnt change anything with the die size, however