Quote Originally Posted by informal View Post
What about 960 stream/48TMU ? Ratio is fine .It could be an option for a 40nm shrink.
The above is just one very far fetched possibility since the die area didn't increase that much from the report we saw in OP.
True, but this would mean that RV870 is delayed, which wouldn't be a logical gamble for ATI. Risk GT200b beating a 40nm refresh, and have a longer wait to RV870 than if they forgo a refresh?
It WOULD however follow their "new strategy", that they announced awhile back. I think that it was around every 6 months alternating new arch/new refresh?

One thing that I found kind of interesting, concerning the redundancy debate, is that when you look at a die shot of Rv770 detailing the chips internals, there is possibility for their argument, at least as far as shaders go. If you look to the left of the "SIMD group", it looks almost like there are 4 extra shaders per group. X10, and we would get the extra 40. If you don't see it, look at the pattern.