ATI News Thread

[DilTech]

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33826885

1. Late September Launch Date Set for Three R500 Desktop Discrete Chips (R520, RV530, and RV515): Addressing the rampant rumours surrounding the R520 launch date, ATI stated its plan of record is to launch all three 90nm R500 desktop discrete chips (the enthusiast R520, the performance RV530, and the value RV515) in late September. The shipment dates will likely be staggered for the three chips, based on the delivery cycles from TSMC, with one likely shipping at launch date and the other two within the first half of October. The R520 was originally planned for a June launch, while the RV530 and RV515 launch times are only a few weeks delayed from their original schedule. The R520 had been sampling since Dec/04, and although the architecture and 90nm process were not a problem, ATI was not able to run the clock fast enough due to a “soft ground� issue that was discovered in late July after debugging with several re-spins. Specifically, the R520 and RV530 had functional yields, but could not run at high speeds, while the RV515 and the C1 (the 90nm Xbox graphics chip) did not have any issues. ATI concedes it has lost the OEM designs (primarily Dell) to NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX for enthusiast desktop PCs for both the back-to-school and holiday season, but believes the retail and channel (add-in-board) markets for the R520 chip remain available (representing over 2/3rds of the enthusiast market). Both ATI and NVIDIA did not refresh their back-to-school product stack for the performance/mainstream/value segments, with ATI indicating it has kept a significant share of design wins awarded in the March to May timeframe, based on its ATI X700, X600, X550, and X300 (competing against NVIDIA’s GeForce 6200 and 6600). In terms of performance, ATI believes the R520 should exceed the GeForce 7800 GTX in benchmark tests if it can get the proper clock speed, but recognizes that NVIDIA has some headroom to overclock the GeForce 7800 clock speeds. We do not expect ATI to launch its R580 (speculated to have 32 pixel pipelines) in C2005 (ATI does not want to stall the channel for the R520), and expect a refresh of the R500 family beginning in spring 2006 with RV560, followed by RV540 and RV505. We expect the R600 (DirectX 10, targeting Microsoft Vista operating system and WGF 2.0, the next generation graphics library) in Q4/F06 or Q1/F07.

No R580 until spring/summer, meaning NO 32 piped cards until next year... ATi also admits that if NVidia crank up the 7800 clockspeeds, that ATi are in trouble, as their big problem with the R520 has been not being able to get it's clockspeeds up high enough to compete with NVidia this round. Also, of note, the R600 is expected end of the year 2006/beginning of 2007.

To sum it up, ATi isn't so sure that the R520 is a real match for the G71/7800ultra/7900gtx/whatever nvidia wants to call it, and ATi has NO plans on releasing the R580 to counter NVidia's refresher card as they cannot afford to steal their own sales away from the R520, which is going to be a VERY expensive card, rumored to weigh in with a $700 price tag.... With ATi being worried, this pretty much means we won't see anything TOO fancy(i.e. probably no 512bit memory bus) or they'd seem a little more sure of themselves here, which they are not. Also, we also have a CONFIRMATION of a paper launch...