GeForce GTX295 Card Exposed

[D-Cyph3r]

Am I the only 1 who figure that they went with a sandwich design again not because of the size of the die, but because 2 sets of 448bit 869MB would be impossible to fit on a single PCB?

EDIT: Ah, Helmore had the right idea aswell.

[v_rr]

Remember that SidePort is still disabled in HD 4870X2. Now Sideport enable can be a priority to ATI (before it wasn´t because ATI had a huge advantage, so no need to activate it), and get a new magic speed bump

[Luka_Aveiro]

Remember that SidePort is still disabled in HD 4870X2. Now Sideport enable can be a priority to ATI (before it wasn´t because ATI had a huge advantage, so no need to activate it), and get a new magic speed bump

Atrological powers are known to be high near Christmas.

[v_rr]

Atrological powers are known to be high near Christmas.

Just a guess, don´t take it to serious
If it don´t happen it Christmas and Santa Claus fault

Anyway Sideport is there waiting to be used. My theory is that ATI is keeping it unused, and bring a magical boost by January time.
It´s very unusual they have that feature and don´t use it.... I remember ATI talked that there will be 3 phases in HD 4800 and 2 of them where already rolled out, but they never talked about phase number 3. Maybe Sideport, or they simply forget it.

[ToTTenTranz]

Just a guess, don´t take it to serious
If it don´t happen it Christmas and Santa Claus fault

Anyway Sideport is there waiting to be used. My theory is that ATI is keeping it unused, and bring a magical boost by January time.
It´s very unusual they have that feature and don´t use it.... I remember ATI talked that there will be 3 phases in HD 4800 and 2 of them where already rolled out, but they never talked about phase number 3. Maybe Sideport, or they simply forget it.

I heard that sometimes the manufacturers put some logic in the chip that they'll never use, just to study how it behaves on mass-production.
For example, I read somewhere that all the Geforce FX line had an experimental SLI logic in them.

As far as I know, using Sideport on HD4870X2 won't make a difference unless that card turns out being capable of using a shared memory pool for both GPUs. The presence of SidePort in R700 could be, as I told above, an experimental feature for the shared memory pool in R800. I also heard it could eventually be used for GPGPU apps in the future, but not for gaming (the same way the GT200 has a lot of stuff that only turns on for CUDA).