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R600 is fabbed on 80nm, AGP parts coming
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 3rd April 2007
R600 will be fabbed on TSMC's 80 nanometre process, after all.
At some point during the show, rumours emerged suggesting that AMD had switched its upcoming high-end graphics chip from 80nm to 65nm because it was leaking current pretty badly.
Sharma first indirectly confirmed that R600 would be manufactured on 80nm when discussing the advantages of 80nm over 90nm. "Yeah, I think the big advantage that 80 gives you over 90 from a process perspective is transistor density. You just get more and the chip will cost less for a given transistor count than it would at 90."
He then went onto confirm it pretty much outright a little later in the interview: "Oh the R600 wasn't the first 80nm part we've done." This has pretty much invalidated the first part of the 65nm rumour, but Sharma wasn't finished there.
"From a process perspective we have not had 80nm process issues on the R600." Together, the two quotes almost completely dismiss the rumour that the chip was badly leaking current and that it was cancelled in favour of a 65nm version.
What it does mean though, is that AMD probably has a 65nm version of R600 up its sleeve for a later date. If and when the 65nm part is introduced will depend on how much headroom there is left in R600 after the chip is clocked high enough to knock GeForce 8800 GTX off its perch. Of course, it's also dependent on what Nvidia has up its sleeve too, as GeForce 8800 GTX has been the undisputed performance leader for almost six months now.
The other interesting tidbit that Sharma revealed was that AMD's bridge chip will work with the R600 family of graphics processors. He said that AMD will not design the PCBs for the AGP variants, and that it is up to partners to design AGP-based R6xx products. That is the same as the current situation, so we're confident that you'll see AGP-based R600 family products appearing some time after its official announcement.
Are you looking forward to seeing how fast R600 is, or are you looking for a makeover for your aging AGP system? Let us know in the forums.
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Comments (20)
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I missed that. :o
good news about the bridge chip for those back on AGP though
I have a 2.8ghz Prescott, 2gb DDR, 320gb SATA2 that's plenty fast for everything, all I need is a faster card for games.
My Pentium M 740 @ 2.7Ghz could really use a great video card and i'd rather keep it than have to buy an extra board-cpu-ram just to have a recent video card
only problem though is that once games will require dual core processors.... i'll be screwed
Eventually, you've got to ask why bother spending the extra to get an AGP-converted card, when a good mobo with a PCI-e slot and the PCI-e version can be had for the same price...
Dothan's are a special case, but that's always been the way with them. ;)
The only real benefit right now is dual pci-e cards and future proofing.
While old this article has valid points...
http://www.sudhian.com/index.php?/articles/show/measuring_the_benefits_of_agp_is_pci_express_necessary/analysis_conclusions
For me, I don't want to spend around $600-1,000 upgrading my system right now. It's not worth it for the speed increase. The only increase I need is a video card increase.
"It's pointless porting faster and faster GPU's over to an AGP config because eventually you'll be utterly bottlenecked by your CPU"
Why dish out money for such a high end video card it's better to upgrade peripherals and go with a mid range card. You will get more performance wise and be able to future proof.
and this resumes everything for me :)
So far though I have managed to miss out sckt939, DDR2 and AM2 which has saved me money while still having a pc thats fast enough to run all the latest games well by keeping AGP :)
It seems like newer GPU's are actually using more than PXIe x8, and benefit from 16x. I wonder if AGP will actually degrade the performance on some DX10 cards.