Bad news for ATI Crossfire

[Ugly n Grey]

They are ramping the chipset to support M2 CPU's which will have three HT bus' just like their big bro's

[Quazi]

I am willing to wait so hopefully, when Crossfire is released, there won't be any issues or bugs. I see so many m8's posting on another forum I participate in, complaining that they can't get SLI to work properly. And these guys aren't newbs, at least alot of them aren't. I am sure there are a few. I have been seeing those threads weekly over there ever since SLI was released. Maybe they are going to release it to coincide with FUDO. Who knows.

[Mr. Tinker]

Guys guys, ATI is raleasing their first chipset sometime this year where nvidia has been in this market for a lot of years now. We simply can not expect the sky from ATI at this point. They experience many problems that they never experienced before with the production. I would not be surprised if CrossFire gets delayed a bit.

ATI has released a few chipsets before.

[Ubermann]

The chipset done have to be more overclockable compared to Nvidia.
The point is to get it out and be able to run 2 Ati-cards so it can compete with SLI.

[Zebo]

Meh.. what we need from nV they won't give us.. Hardware accelerated 3D audio like NF2 had (MCP-T) and a decent on-board graphics like NF2 had (GF4MX) for system integraters.. maybe 6200TC level with DVI out.

[turtle]

um...you mean like C[rush]51...which, um...is pretty much EXACTLY that?

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/07...idia_c51_6200/

Realtek HD audio, which indeed isn't the greatest, but it's still on-par or better than what's currently out there on most mobos. No clue about DVI.

[Zebo]

Um not quite MCP-T was and still is the only sound solution which supported hardware 3d accel. Meaning zero CPU use vs. 3-8% for on-board realteks. It also supported DD decoding.

[xenolith]

PCI-X16 kind of reminds me of the old ATA133 IDE interface OEMs were marketing back in the day. Even today I see people say "it's only an ATA100 standard hard drive, so it's too slow for me." I don't think anyone ever did make a PATA hard drive that went about 100MB/s burst rate, no less a sustained rate, did they?

It's kind of what's going on with SATAII right now too. Yeah, if only we had SATA hard drives that were capable of even coming close to 1.5gbs sustained tranfer rates, no less 3gbs.

[turtle]

Hey, i'm not one to argue, SS was the shat...But we must bury it and move on. Socket A is dead. SS was awesome, but there's nothing comparible on modern tech...Well until SS2, which last I heard will reappear on the chipset after C51, or as a standalone product. That's about as good as it gets for all-in-one solution...Unless ATi's IGP boards are any good...but that's still just Azalia and Realtek...but anyways, I digress. Apologies on the TJ.

[DudeMiester]

It isn't non-sense, unlike ATA133. You really can use the bandwidth, but you have to code with it in mind. It's great for doing things like procedural textures, in-game streaming video, massively dynamic and moving geometry, and more.

[trans am]

You mean delayed again.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25198

[LowRun]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25198

Yep, saw this one too. Seems like ATI is plagued by some sort of ancient malediction

[saratoga]

I don't think the extra lanes will matter for a very long time (long after the chipset is obsolete), but I'm worried this might convince mother board companies to relegate crossfire to buget systems or skip it altogther.

[turtle]

The boards should be ready for September, and ATI pushed it back by a month [From the back to schoool season in early-mid august -Turt]...µ
__________________________________________________ _______________
We asked, for fun, when Crossfile was going to be available and we learned that ATI plans to have it ready sometime in September.

You can take that as official information as it comes from an ATI official. The demo ran fine, and the system had two boards, connected with external cables so it is the real stuff.

ATI decided to show this dual card rendering machine with some vanilla technology demo as it was more suitable for the show where serious graphic people gathers.

ATI did push this marchitecture further around as it wants to get it done the way it is supposed to but it’s not an easy thing to do. But it stands the risk of missing the back to school period, which must worry its partners as well as itself. µ
__________________________________________________ _______________

Crossfire will be available early September

I don't think that sounds bad at all...Sounds like the chipset will be super-tweaked up to the end. I like revisions...It's better than them releasing a crappier product faster and then fixing it later. Plus, it'll coincide with R5xxs' launch within a couple weeks if not less, which is perfect anyway. With GTs/GTXs/Ultras and R5xxs, and the like coming shortly, I doubt many will buy a second old-gen sm2.0 card instead of one new one even if it were released earlier.

The 2x16 SLI thing is a joke to me because of potential bottlenecks, and crossfire is still a bigger step forward because it brings competition to nvidia in the dual-gpu market. Even if the now "value" SLI boards go down in price, it's still going to come down to who has the better cards this gen(unknown), the better enthusiast boards (unknown), and the overall performance of SLI vs. Crossfire (also unknown.) I'd hardly call ATi in trouble because of these devlopements from Nvidia. If their products are better than nvidia's, i'm sure we'll all have short-term memories about the delays. That's not to say it couldn't go the other way though...There's just a lot more to it then just the boards release date and a potential price differance.

[sandys]

Will this not open up the possibility of quad-gpu? with dual gpu cards using one x16 slot in a 8/8 config per gpu as SLI does now, maybe there will be a possibility of using two dual-gpu cards in tandem?

[Gogar]

They are ramping the chipset to support M2 CPU's which will have three HT bus' just like their big bro's

Then what are all the 939 pins for, if socket 940 does have 3 HT links?
I thought socket 939 had 3 links too, just not coherent.
You're saying socket 939 has a ton of useless pins?
I guess i should dig into the technical papers of the A64....

[Hicks]

yeah, this is almost a step backwards for nvidia. Added latency, and no real world performance increase going ot 16x. It's purely a marketing blow against ATI, nothing really important.

I agree, doesn't mean all in my view.

I dunno how people can say bad news, etc etc, so if crossfire completey kicks ass at release you think it won't be succes?

[NickK]

Then what are all the 939 pins for, if socket 940 does have 3 HT links?
I thought socket 939 had 3 links too, just not coherent.
You're saying socket 939 has a ton of useless pins?
I guess i should dig into the technical papers of the A64....

Memory channels make a big portion IIRC - ie two sets of address and data busses.

[joe2004]

At this point everything ATI has is light years below NVidia and everything they release is a bit too late and a bit too slow. One has to wonder what kind of bufoons run this company now. But then again who cares. :-)
Maybe ATI shareholders?
The funny thing is that on the Wall Street the analysts (I gotta laugh here) are upgrading ATI every few weeks while ATI's share price keeps on sinking in the same time. Some sanity.

[saratoga]

Then what are all the 939 pins for, if socket 940 does have 3 HT links?
I thought socket 939 had 3 links too, just not coherent.
You're saying socket 939 has a ton of useless pins?

Pretty much. Its got something like 100+ pins that don't actually connect to anything IIRC. I was pretty surprised when I looked at the datasheets.

[texuspete00]

That little link on SLI cards is because otherwise it would stress the bus. It's really not the be all end all of slot bandwidth. I don't know how this is a bad thing.

i don't want to be a fanboy, but I've been uninterested in ATi for awhile now. Then again if I was foaming at the mouth for crossfire boards/chipsets, crossfire cards, or Ati's full precision PS3.0 card... I'd be very wet by now. I would have imagined they are thoroughly wearing their fanbase down.

[chew*]

Guys guys, ATI is raleasing their first chipset sometime this year where nvidia has been in this market for a lot of years now. We simply can not expect the sky from ATI at this point. They experience many problems that they never experienced before with the production. I would not be surprised if CrossFire gets delayed a bit.

This is not ati's first chipset............

see this link for past ATI chipsets.http://www.asus.com/products3.aspx?l...N%209100%20IGP

I actually owned this board mainly for testing and it was supposed to support 533/800 fsb socket 478 however it did worse with a 3.0 gig 800 fsb P4 then it did with a 2.5 gig 533 fsb P4 and it ran hot as hell although the onboard video rivaled that of nvidia's onboard solutions and surpassed it in most cases.