ATI r420

[fantomas]

No matter what anyone says, ATI is still on schedule with the R400 now called R420 and we should see this card introduced by the end of this exciting year

thats from the inq, don't believe the disinfo about them not coming up with the rumour goods (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9672) ...

[Hanners]

R420 isn't what was known as R400. It's actually what is also referred to as R390 or 'Loci', i.e. the 0.13 micron-based R300 chip, which will supposedly have double the performance of R300.

[Uttar]

It's the opposite, actually.

The R400 *has* been scrapped, and the R420/R390/Loci will be known in an official manner as the "R400" - while the *true* R400 will never be, but most of the ideas behind it and stuff will be in the R500.

Uttar

EDIT: Note that ATI might have decided to still name it R420 officially or whatever, and try to make people believe some other BS. That's up to them, not me. But my point is that the R420 *isn't* the real R400.
"Will the real R400 please stand up?" :D

[PreservedSwine]

Kind of funny, but I read Hanners and Utters posts as both being absolutley 100% correct:thumbsup:

[rwolf]

It will be interesting to see if these rumors about the demise of the R400 have any truth.

I find it hard to believe that after 2 years of development they would cancel it just as it was to be taped out.

And then suddenly in just a few months boom there is loci a chip that runs twice as fast as R350.

Something is not right here.

[Uttar]

Two things:

1. Loci is supposed to be two times faster than R300, not two times faster than R350
2. It isn't like the R400 was cancelled yesterday. It might have been early this year, or before. Heck, they might use part of what they did for R500 anyway, I guess...


Uttar

[Hanners]

Originally posted by Uttar
2. It isn't like the R400 was cancelled yesterday. It might have been early this year, or before. Heck, they might use part of what they did for R500 anyway, I guess...

Yep, I think this is the general idea - To carry the work that was done on R400 over into R500.

[webmedic]

From what mufu has stated and no I don't have any links. The r400 was more or less renamed r500 and is waiting for .09 to be a feasable design.


The rest about r390/r420/loci is correct.

[suburbanguy]

so if the original R400 is now renamed R500, then what happened to the
original R500 (yes, five hundred, just to be clear) that the R300 team/ west coast team was working on?????

[Hellbinder]

It will be interesting to see if these rumors about the demise of the R400 have any truth.

The rumors are True. The R400 was officially canned several months ago.

The R400 was not renamed the R500. The R400 partially implimented some of the concepts that will be the R500. Thus is is reversed logic to say it the other way around. The R400 was canned this year because it was really origional in its approach to certain things, and there was simply not enough time to fully perfect it. It had some design issues that were not going to get solved in the time alloted.

Thus we have the the temporary solution to the problem, the R390. Which is the R300 core taken to its most extreme point. Just imagine in your head what they would have to do to the R300 core to make it yes 2.5x faster than an R300 and you will be pretty close. Along with increases in the Shader pipelines, Fragment processing, AF speed, Fill rate, Vertex throughput etc, Shadow Volume processing etc etc..

In essence the R390 is Akin to a Tricked out Harley with a V8. Or perhaps you could thik of it similar to the last V8 Interceptor shown in the origional Mad Max.

[Sazar]

Originally posted by Hellbinder
The rumors are True. The R400 was officially canned several months ago.

The R400 was not renamed the R500. The R400 partially implimented some of the concepts that will be the R500. Thus is is reversed logic to say it the other way around. The R400 was canned this year because it was really origional in its approach to certain things, and there was simply not enough time to fully perfect it. It had some design issues that were not going to get solved in the time alloted.

Thus we have the the temporary solution to the problem, the R390. Which is the R300 core taken to its most extreme point. Just imagine in your head what they would have to do to the R300 core to make it yes 2.5x faster than an R300 and you will be pretty close. Along with increases in the Shader pipelines, Fragment processing, AF speed, Fill rate, Vertex throughput etc, Shadow Volume processing etc etc..

In essence the R390 is Akin to a Tricked out Harley with a V8. Or perhaps you could thik of it similar to the last V8 Interceptor shown in the origional Mad Max.

first off... wb...

now... 2.5x faster ?

thats gonna be quite a bit of signal seepage init ?

any info on the layers and transistor counts ?

[Hellbinder]

No, i cann't say that I have any Transistor count info. I dont really pursue info like that to tell you the truth.

I should have said *roughly* 2.5x faster. It will be greater than 2x Faster in a number of areas. I feel confident enough in saying that *just* 2x faster does not do it Justice.

[digitalwanderer]

Will it indeed be named the "R420 Tea-time Radeon"?

I MUST own one! :D

[suburbanguy]

I was hoping to see a R350/R360 MAXX solution.

but maybe there will be a R390 MAXX aka Loci MAXX :D
(thus 4-5x R300!!!!) if R4XX series is canned.

that could hold ATI's performance position until R500 arrives.

just wild speculation :D

[SOLR]

I dont think you guys know why r400 was canned!

1) It was a feasible project
2) Everything was nearly done

Then...! Microsoft screw it! Why?

Direct X 9 took 18 months to release.
Direct X 10 will take 24 months!

R400 was a DirectX 10 chip! but it wouldnt make any sense to release anything DX10 1 year before release!(Make sense?)

So they basically look at ways to improve on R300 to make the ultimate DX9 chip without too much R&D Costs. And completely canned r400 and decided to go with R500 next year(2004), so when DX10 will be finally released we will have a second generation DX10 part on our hand from the start.

What Loci will be?
Still not sure...
but im sure they will:
1) Use DDR2
2) Use .13 micron

but that alone is not enought for a 2.5X perfo(250%) over r300
(r350 is only barely faster than r300: 25-35%).

I suspect 16 pipes(that was part of the r400 design) to be in there, but 16 DX9 pipes, instead of the pipes of the r400. If my theory is right, you can expect the transistor count to be around 200M. Thats ok for a .13 micron part, and its less than the original r400 specs.(Around 250M)

Expect NV40 to be the same...(maybe NVIDIA did the exact same move ATI did...NV40 is probably not the original NV40) Maybe NVIDIA did see it coming, because of their good relationship with Microsoft.

[Hanners]

Originally posted by SOLR
R400 was a DirectX 10 chip! but it wouldnt make any sense to release anything DX10 1 year before release!(Make sense?)

Wrong. R400 would have still been a DirectX 9 chip, but would most likely have been able to utilise the full featureset of DirectX 9 - Pixel Shader 3.0, Vertex Shader 3.0 etc.

[webmedic]

Hanners,
that is what I knew ot be true also.

[gmontem]

Any chances Loci will support 8x AA? :D

[webmedic]

that I am not sure but we do know this.

.13 mocron core
16x1 pipes
supposedly 2 to 3 times faster than the original r300 core. (radeon 9700)
possibly gddr3

the rest is well speculation and even at this it is unsule if it will be 16x1 or 8x2 for the pipes. Most of the people who know seem to think 16x1 but we will see.

I have heard rumors on the ram but it's not worth speculating on and also there are rumors of a pci express version of the card.

Whatever can be said for the card is that ati is much further along than most know or would even think. I can't say why they have played against nvidia like they have but if was to guess they are playing cat and mouse right now like nvidia did with them in years past. Ati simply has better tech for now. I don't think they want to show what they have for the next round untill the nv40 is released.

At this point nvidia is having to do allot of driver cheats to get thier score up. I'm not sure what went wrong for them in the current series of cards but we can hope that they get it all ironed out in the nv40 line.

[Monolyth]

"R420"

Obviously the folks @ ATI have taken up mary jane. "Reefer 420", I mean c'mon ATI!!! I expect a cannibus shaped heatsink!!!

And perhaps have a big ole tube come out the back of it with smoke coming out everyonce in awhile...yeah...

Oh aherm...sorry about that.

:)

[Hanners]

Originally posted by webmedic
that I am not sure but we do know this.

.13 mocron core
16x1 pipes
supposedly 2 to 3 times faster than the original r300 core. (radeon 9700)
possibly gddr3

the rest is well speculation and even at this it is unsule if it will be 16x1 or 8x2 for the pipes. Most of the people who know seem to think 16x1 but we will see.

I don't think we'll be seeing GDDR-3 in 'Loci', it's going to arrive too early for it to be available in any kind of quantity (although the core may well support it as a possiblity to be added to future revisions).

As for the number of pipes, I'd be suprised to see a 16x1 architecture, I'm angling more towards it being either 8x1 or 8x2.

[Gar]

I also read that ATI's next gen chip will use GDDR3.

[webmedic]

Originally posted by Hanners
I don't think we'll be seeing GDDR-3 in 'Loci', it's going to arrive too early for it to be available in any kind of quantity (although the core may well support it as a possiblity to be added to future revisions).

As for the number of pipes, I'd be suprised to see a 16x1 architecture, I'm angling more towards it being either 8x1 or 8x2.

Yea me to on the gddr3 that why I said possibly not likely but possibly.

As for the rest it was from watching mufu and a few others posts. So it's more a matter of how much you trust them. From what I understood though it was planed to be 16x1 or 8x2.

[SOLR]

Thats why I think DDR2, will be used.

[StealthHawk]

Isn't NV40 supposed to come out before "R400."

Isn't NV40 supposed to be more advanced than "R400," because of some of the things that were cut from the original R400 design? I wouldn't say that nvidia is still behind technology-wise for sure.