R520 will be 700 and 800mhz with 16 pipes??

maverik-sg1

New member
DESPITE ALL that has been glittering like gold or pyrites before, it transpires that ATI flagship R520 cunningly nicknamed "Fudo" will feature only sixteen pipelines. The sources close to the company earlier indicated that the R520 might have even more pipes but this won't be the case. The R580 will end up with more pipes but R520 has its higher clock to fight Nvidia's counterpart.

Some of the chips will work at 700MHz or even 800MHz but yields at those speeds won't be satisfactory. Nevertheless, there is a good indication that overclockers will like this technology and will get them to run at sky high speeds.

The cards are floating around and ATI could paper launch them even now but would not be able to ship it until the first days of October. That is the rough launch date for this product launch and availability. I don’t think that you will be able to buy R520 master cards at this time but those will follow in a few weeks time after the normal ones.

The performance will be very close to existing 7800 GTX but we don’t know weather will R520 end up faster or slower than this Nvidia flagship card. However it turns out it will be close, very close.

Funny thing is that a few quarters back Nvidia was so scared of the R520 that it postponed its NV50 project and brought G70, more pipelines version of tweaked NV40 marchitecture and harvested the market with it. Nvidia is still the only company shipping its current generation high end part while ATI will launch its answer one quarter later. ATI missed the back to school period but will sure be on this for xmas (this year lol).
 
Ill believe it when i see it, like i always say.

Who says it's not the mid range card, or the Pro version, etc....
 
I agree that they probably kept 32 pipes and locked faulty ones to reduce it to 16 pipes and increase the yield. I imagine they will increase yield so that they can release the 32 pipe version to compete with the 7800 ultra (if they can by then). I'm just guessing but I really don't think they would hype up the r520 as the next big thing and develop it for ages with 32 pipes and then make it 16 pipes and completely redone at the last minute.
 
There was some news flashing around that yeild rate was 1-3% for the 32pipeline card.

I think ATi was trying for too much, they were using fast switching transistors, which operate at higher speeds but bring down yeilds rates alot, I guess they decided to go with a fast clock and lower number of pipelines, that way 3dMark performances appear better.
 
One suspects that the yield that made the grade became console bound - R580 has passed testing successfully on the first tape with 24/32pipes, no yield info yet but looks promising - released maybe xmas05, deffo 1st qtr06 (immediately after 7800ultra is released from Nvidia I am led to believe).

It would be good news for the enthusiast if that is the case reference locked pipes - as there may be a few r520 gems released that can be unlocked and all that goodness can be released.

The master card for crossfire for r520 looks set to be in stock 4-6 weeks after first batch of r520's are made available.

Mav
 
Grov said:
Ill believe it when i see it, like i always say.

Who says it's not the mid range card, or the Pro version, etc....

The mainstream (r515??) unit is ready to sell - but wont be released until the flagship r520 is ready ;)
 
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