ATI is working on 40nm chips

[Heinz68]

According to Fuad, maybe more good news about ATI.
ATI is working on 40nm chips
Written by Fuad Abazovic (http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8645&Itemid=34) Tuesday, 29 July 2008 09:09
That is the next thing

The RV730 40nm version might be the first 40nm graphics chip ever. ATI is heavily working on such a design and, of course, after 55nm RV770 there should be a 40 nm RV8x0 chip coming.

The company won’t go for 45nm, and it will rather go directly for 40nm, as the silicon ends up smaller and you can increase the clocks additionally.

It looks like ATI will once again end up being first to bring the new architecture to market and Nvidia will follow at some later date.

The first 40nm chips should be out by first half of 2009.

[Redeemed]

According to Fuad, maybe more good news about ATI.

This can be dangerous for them. I hope the first 40nm part isn't high end but instead low end or mainstream. Then once they "perfect" the process release some high-end parts.

[Heinz68]

From the article "The RV730 40nm version might be the first 40nm graphics chip ever."
The RV710 and RV730 are supposed replace the 3000 series cards.

[Viral]

The company won’t go for 45nm, and it will rather go directly for 40nm, as the silicon ends up smaller and you can increase the clocks additionally.

Oh FFS. TSMC have no 45nm process for GPU's it's not something ATI have a choice on. Just shows how much research these authors actally do....

The only thing to get from this article is that ATI will release a low end chip on 40nm first. I can't see 40nm parts rolling out until '09 so high end next-gen parts should come shortly after with any luck.

[Heinz68]

Completely different rumor from Hardspell compared to the Fudzilla article.
Well September is not so far away so we will find out soon if Hardspell (http://en.hardspell.com/doc/showcont.asp?news_id=3833) is right.
RV730 will be 55nm technology, possible 700MHz and it will have two versions: RV730XT and RV730Pro. They will launch market in September.

[msxyz]

Has anyone started producing 45nm chips, beyond Intel and IBM? I mean actual mass production not just some engineering samples. AMD is almost there with the help of IBM but they prefer to reserve their fabs for their own microprocessors, outsourcing the graphics chip to 3rd party foundries (maybe because their own fabs are "tuned" to produce just microprocessor instead of working with off-the-shelf logic blocks... I'm just speculating)

40nm for a chip stated to appear this autumn seem a bit too early.

[Viral]

I doubt we will see any 40nm chips this year, low end or not. RV730 will most likely be 55nm.

[Heinz68]

Another report on ATI 40nm RV870, now codenamed "Lil Dragon".
This time from NordicHardware (http://www.nordichardware.com/news,7999.html). Looks like the article is mainly about speculation, estimates and presumption, even by they own admission.
RV870 codenamed "Lil Dragon", 40nm
Written by Andreas G 02 August 2008 18:50

It's been known for some time that RV870 would be a shrink of RV770. The node following 65/55nm would be 45/40nm, but we weren't sure if AMD would go to 45nm or directly to half-node 40nm. It's now clear that AMD will go directly to 40nm and aim for a performance per watt ratio twice that of RV770. RV870 has been code-named "Lil Dragon", which does indicate that this will be something small, yet something to fear.:)

The overall performance has been suggested to be somewhere around 20% better than RV770 with a significant drop in power consumption. This points to 960 shaders (192x5), 48 texture units, 24 ROPs and so forth. If this is the case, TDP of the RV870 should be around 150W at most with today's frequencies. This is just an estimate on our part as technical specifications are still hard to come by. We also presume AMD to stay at DirectX 10.1 for now.
The underline and the smiley was my addition.

[Viral]

Bah, I wouldn't presume more ROPS. I'd expect 160 more sp's and higher clocks, that would give 20% + whatever the clock speed increase is.