R580 is just a X1800 XT speed bump up!

[superklye]

About:
Well I'm almost sure that there is going to be little more than speed bumb up, but why speculate?
The point is what is all off a sudden wrong with just speed bumb up?
The point is that just a speed bump != new core.

A 6800GT is an NV40 just as an Ultra is. The only difference is that the Ultra is 50-75MHz faster.

A new core implies that it's got new features, not a faster clock.

[fatal1ty]

About:
Well I'm almost sure that there is going to be little more than speed bumb up, but why speculate?
The point is what is all off a sudden wrong with just speed bumb up?


Not if it has 48 working pipelines. Im sure the core and memory speeds will be higher too.

[retsam]

Not if it has 48 working pipelines. this sounds a lot like hardware unified pipes to me...

[Nitz Walsh]

www.beyond3d.com

Guys, stop going to the frickin' Inquirer to get your 3d rumour info. All the inq does is gather up posts from sites (many times directly from Beyond3D actually) and speculate based on little knowledge and a heaping of misunderstanding of 3d terminology. They're an absolute joke. Beyond3D actually has contributions from people within the manufacturers.

Just please don't post. :)

[deimos47ca]

www.beyond3d.com

Guys, stop going to the frickin' Inquirer to get your 3d rumour info. All the inq does is gather up posts from sites (many times directly from Beyond3D actually) and speculate based on little knowledge and a heaping of misunderstanding of 3d terminology. They're an absolute joke. Beyond3D actually has contributions from people within the manufacturers.

Just please don't post. :)

woah.. wait a sec,

you're telling me that everthing the inquirer says isn't 100% the holy truth... :eek:

if you dig through years of their predictions you will see that often they are right.. but only because they cover all the angles... ex: r520. First they say it will be 32 pipelines. Then they say 24. And finally they say 16. And ofcourse everbody cheers when they are right.. well, ONE OF THEM has to be right... right? I wouldnt be surprised if for G80 they make guesses 24/32/48/64 an even 128.. just to make sure they have all their bases covered :rolleyes:

[retsam]

www.beyond3d.com

Guys, stop going to the frickin' Inquirer to get your 3d rumour info. All the inq does is gather up posts from sites (many times directly from Beyond3D actually) and speculate based on little knowledge and a heaping of misunderstanding of 3d terminology. They're an absolute joke. Beyond3D actually has contributions from people within the manufacturers.

Just please don't post. welcome to three years ago....

[Redeemed]

Well, the R580 might be the 512MB GTX killer- that is all fine and good (I'm NOT saying that it WILL be though), what matters is that it is AVAILABLE. If ATI can pull off a hard launch with the R580 and even throw in CrossFire, and have the R580 actually perform to impress, then that's something. Untill then, I doubt public opinion about them will change much.

[Sazar]

Crossfire sounded SOOOO promising on paper but now with teh boards/master-cards and availability, its a fiasco.

Performance is there but where are the products?

Wrt r580, if it is a new product rather than a simple refresh, it could make things interesting. I might wait for an r580 AIW product.

[Treason]

/bump

Two months left until bankruptcy! (xmassign)

[Redeemed]

I'll be very surprised if this little streak of bad luck causes ATI to go bankrupt. Afterall, you must not forget their revenue from the Xbox360. They ARE still making money off of that.

Plus, with the R580, and R620 comming- ATi is just having some "downtime", but I'll be surprised if they are close to bankruptcy. If anything, they might have to "downsize" (lay-off workers) a bit, but they'll still be kicking.

Also, as a consumer, if ATI IS really close to sealing their own coffin, then you should be freaking out.

Look at the prices of current top-of-the-line GPUs, even with what competition we do have they are still sky high. Now eliminate nVidia's main competitor, and you'll be paying $1k plus for your next high end vcard. Add a second one and you could be paying over $2k for your vcard(s). There's no one I'm excited abit ATI throwing in the towel, I pray it never comes to that. In fact, I'd love to see S3 get in on the action, and maybe even a little fiercer competition from Intel just to keep the other companies in check. Heck, I bet Intel could make a single GPU that'd swipe the floor with two 512MB GTXs if they REALLY wanted to. And if ATI goes, I just might want them to! ;)

Oh well, enough of me ranting. I doubt that the X1800XT (which I'm assuming is supposed to be the R580) is just a speed bump. I expect more pipes, more competitive performance, and more competitive prices. Also, availability is another thing that I'm expecting. ATi really needs to move away from all these paper launches and delays. Deliver a product on time and in mass quantity, and they'll stand a fair chance competing with nVidia for that round.

[agentkay]

Maybe he meant his own bankruptcy, because he wants to buy one or two of these cards. IDK.(cheers)

[Treason]

Well, one month until your predicted bankruptcy of ATi AthlonXP1800. It really doesn't look like it will happen as it looks like ATi managed to produce a half decent product in sufficient quantities this time.

A competitive and available product from ATi means it won't follow the historical paths of Commodore, Amiga, or 3DFX. Although I appreciate your reasons for stating such, I think a noticeable proportion of the market will return to ATi's offerings.

[7900GTX]

Amiga is a commodore brand, remember?

And ati will be here a bit longer because there are OEM wins to score right now which nvidia is missing out on with it's products (releasing the underperforming 7300GS and not being able to show 7600 and 7900 untill march.)

[AthlonXP1800]

Well, one month until your predicted bankruptcy of ATi AthlonXP1800. It really doesn't look like it will happen as it looks like ATi managed to produce a half decent product in sufficient quantities this time.


Last year I predicted ATI bankrupted next month "if" they still not launched new X1800 products or X1900 launched in March but the situations was changed that why ATI had done everything they can to save the business from collapse because they so far failed to made a healthy profit after 3 bad quarters.

10,000 X1900 cards this time wasnt enough, 30,000 will do, but ATI were really worked very hard to produced 10,000 X1900 cards, it look like they wont make a profiit from it because it very complex chips. ATI Q2 2006 probably will be another bad quarter with 2 big setbacks with RD580 motherboards delayed until March and received alot less royalities on Xbox 360 as it failed to meet sales target of 3 millions units in 90 days, Xbox 360 is a very complex hardware with 1700 parts than both PS2 and PS3. Can you imagine how 200 people assemble 5.1 billion parts in 3 months? Impossible!

A competitive and available product from ATi means it won't follow the historical paths of Commodore, Amiga, or 3DFX. Although I appreciate your reasons for stating such, I think a noticeable proportion of the market will return to ATi's offerings.

ATI can follow either ways if ATI has a competitive and available product, ATI cant survive if they cant make profit in every quarters, they need profits very bad to fund R&D, sales and marketing, administration etc very efficiently. If they dont make profits then they can use cash available whatever they got until it all dried up. ATI had $258M cash in Q1 2006, here not much enough to fund around $350M in R&D for R600 needed this year. If ATI dont make a very big profit next month then ATI wont last much longer.

[Lfctony]

(bs)

[AthlonXP1800]

(bs)

You know nothing about how companies operate with money or maybe you believed ATI is a non profit charity company.

[agentkay]

Xbox 360 is a very complex hardware with 1700 parts than both PS2 and PS3. Can you imagine how 200 people assemble 5.1 billion parts in 3 months? Impossible!

The production of the X360 can´t be much harder than the production of a motherboard. After all its just a platine with a CPU, GPU, and I don´t think people assemble it, I´m sure its assembled almost completely by industrial robots. And btw, why are you using the 1700 parts PR claim from MS? You should know yourself that it means absolutely nothing. If I counted all "parts" my old computer has, excluding the 200+ million transistors of the GPU, it would easielly be over 1700 parts. lol

Other than that, there are a few points that do hold some truth. Obviously a company needs profits to pay for R&D, but you can´t exactly know how much they need to keep the R600 project on track and schedule. I do think ATI had a bad year in 2005, and I don´t see how the X1800 and X1900 could make up for it. Even the biggest ATI fanboy will have to admit that these to products lines alone won´t pull ATI out of what they lost in 2005. ATI however isn´t just present in the higher-end PC video card market. They have nice OEM deals, and other fields of income.

[Lfctony]

You know nothing about how companies operate with money or maybe you believed ATI is a non profit charity company.

I won't even bother...

[AthlonXP1800]

The production of the X360 can´t be much harder than the production of a motherboard. After all its just a platine with a CPU, GPU, and I don´t think people assemble it, I´m sure its assembled almost completely by industrial robots. And btw, why are you using the 1700 parts PR claim from MS? You should know yourself that it means absolutely nothing. If I counted all "parts" my old computer has, excluding the 200+ million transistors of the GPU, it would easielly be over 1700 parts. lol

Yes the industrial robots do the jobs automatically and very much better job than people on manual job, I think it all about cut Xbox 360 cost and they decided to use labour workers to all the works for them.

The 1700 parts claim came from IGN Microsoft Abandons 90-Day Sales Forecast (http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/679/679759p1.html) news.

Yes it true Microsoft used people to assembled Xbox 360 consoles as well as tested and packed it, god all these poor people will have very very sore back when they done 3 millions units and sued Microsoft. :lol:

You can see Xbox 360 production footage here (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=56837&highlight=production).

Other than that, there are a few points that do hold some truth. Obviously a company needs profits to pay for R&D, but you can´t exactly know how much they need to keep the R600 project on track and schedule. I do think ATI had a bad year in 2005, and I don´t see how the X1800 and X1900 could make up for it. Even the biggest ATI fanboy will have to admit that these to products lines alone won´t pull ATI out of what they lost in 2005. ATI however isn´t just present in the higher-end PC video card market. They have nice OEM deals, and other fields of income.

Yes that right I had no clue how much R600 project cost, ATI never disclosed any of project cost to investors and public but Nvidia did disclosed NV30 project cost of $400M. I think it took them 3 years to researched, designed and developed, expanded from the top to bottom product line, the project started in 1999 and launched in 2002.

[agentkay]

Yes the industrial robots do the jobs automatically and very much better job than people on manual job, I think it all about cut Xbox 360 cost and they decided to use labour workers to all the works for them.

The 1700 parts claim came from IGN Microsoft Abandons 90-Day Sales Forecast (http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/679/679759p1.html) news.

Yes it true Microsoft used people to assembled Xbox 360 consoles as well as tested and packed it, god all these poor people will have very very sore back when they done 3 millions units and sued Microsoft. :lol:

I know where that 1700parts claim came from (Peter Moore, talking to IGN), and I thought it was pretty dumb one when I read it 2 weeks ago, and I just didn´t think it helps you to make a good point when you use that dumb claim yourself. lol

Thanks for the video, that did make me smile. For a second I was worried that they actually handcrafted the PCBs, with a soldering iron 60s style. lol The final visual inspection, test runs, packaging are not too uncommon though. I´m sure it could have been possible to automate all 3 as well, but it would probably cost more than labor for these folks. Poor folks indeed, I would have forgotten one of them white thingies under my jacket at the end of the day. :D

Yes that right I had no clue how much R600 project cost, ATI never disclosed any of project cost to investors and public but Nvidia did disclosed NV30 project cost of $400M. I think it took them 3 years to researched, designed and developed, expanded from the top to bottom product line, the project started in 1999 and launched in 2002.

That explains where your idea of ATI bankruptcy came from and it would have been closer to reality if ATI had nothing more than the video card market. I also personally think you overestimated the R&D costs for the R600. I think they are lower ($200M) because they might include R&D results from Xenos, R520/R580 projects, so it can´t be compared to the NV30 R&D costs. At least thats my assumption, and its nothing more than that.

I think 2006 should be a pretty even year for both Nvidia and ATI in the end. I don´t see any huge changes until the G80/R600 are released and unless one of them royaly sucks (NV30 style). Is this very likely? I think its rather less likely but obviously if one of the IHV ends up with it, it would hurt ATI more than Nvidia, due to the financial situation. Again, thats just my assumption, nothing more.