ATI News Thread

[perkam]

Firstly, to avoid any confusion (this'll be moved to ATI News thread btw, not new news)... the X1600XT's memory bus is 128-bit times two...like the X1800XT's bus is 256-bit x 2 for 512-bit ring bus. Its still a 128-bit memory interface, and only overclocks will prove if memory bandwith scales the same as current hardware with 128-bit buses.

Because of this the X1600XT can either have 128-bit times two or 256-bit imes two, nothing in the middle. And ATI is not keen on giving the X1600XT 512-bit ring bus as that'll mean 44.8Gb/s of memory bandwith which along with its shader processing power will require greater power consumption, more heat and not to mention a bigger pcb.

Following is information is summary of speculation on X1700...

The RV535 (X1700) might be based on a 80nm die size and early reports suggest twice the amount of TMUs as the X1600 but no word on ROPs.

It may well be 8-1-1-1 (8 TMUs) or if the fact that its going to be released alongside the R580 has anything to do with it, it has a greater chance of being 8-1-2-1 resulting in 16 shader pipelines. That may seem optimistic, but remember Nvidia will release its own 7600 in response to this, so the nex gen mainstream battle begins with the x1600...what it ends with will be known March 2006.

Perkam