ATI Screwed!!

[FarFarAway]

Well I'm taking this with a pinch of salt but it is similar to some of the other news I've heard coming from the red side of the GPU market.

It seems that ATI are having huge problems with low yield on their cards. This includes problems with heat leakage, low pipe yields and bad speed binning:

The information on the R520 suggests that there are some extreme yield problems with the current design. Not only are there few working dice per wafer, but a large number of those dice only have 16 pixel units working, and others are lucky to get 24 working. The information I received suggested that the R520 was in fact designed with 32 pixel units (each with multiple ALU’s), but due to the issues that the chip is facing, very few of them so far are fully functioning. There are of course fully functioning parts that have been shown behind closed doors, and apparently Abit showed off a working card at AConn that scored some impressive 3D Marks.

So there are some fully functioning chips out there....but not many. The R520 was pinned for official unveiling by ATI a few months ago, but there have been huge problems for them.

This means that ATI are having problems with other deals (XBox fans look away):

ATI also is trying to perfect the R500 chip, which will be used in the X-Box 360. Is the R500 going through the same teething process as the R520? It is hard to say, especially because the R500 is a totally different architecture with a much different design methodology.

Hmm, not so sure about that one...hope its not true!

The chap is also suspicious of ATI's crossfire:

If you look at NVIDIA’s timeline for SLI, they released their previews of the technology at the same time the nForce 4 chipset was introduced in early Fall of 2004, and about 2 months before SLI products could be bought by the average user, NVIDIA had SLI test rigs in reviewers’ hands. I am not implying that ATI's CrossFire is going to be a inferior product, but it is far from being tried and true. Once reviewers actually receive samples, we will then know how CrossFire stacks up to SLI.

Well yes he has a point, but perhaps a bit unfair

To conclude:

While none of this information is directly from ATI, we can put together the pieces and see that ATI may not have an easy go of it over the next few months, and possibly through the rest of the year. ATI did a great job of capturing marketshare and mindshare with its outstanding Radeon 9700 Pro and later models, but in an industry such as this, it is hard to keep the momentum going. Just ask NVIDIA, one major slipup can cause the entire graphics landscape to change dramatically. Hopefully ATI can get over these issues in a short period of time, and we can continue experiencing the excellent competition that we have enjoyed for the past year.

Well yeah I hope ATI can sort it out (being an nvidia man, I kinda don't at the same time ). But I seriously do, as the figures/specs for the R520 look drool-like.

Lets hope ATI sort it out and pull out a great card!

Full article @ Penstarsys

 

[ionicle_old]

might be interesting to watch! and ppl this means dont throw away your 6800GT or x850 just yet!