- Sunday, 29 November 2009
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Fundamentally, you can't fool Mother Nature in computers, either - Andy Grove - Only the Paranoid Survive
R700 has taped out
A FEW WEEKS ago, a bunch of people suggested that the ATI R700 would be delayed because it won't appear on official platforms until much later. This was the worst case of roadmap misreading I have seen in a long time, made so much more laughable by the fact that it had already taped out.
Yeah, R700 is in the process of being fabbed now, or at least its components are. The component thing is a story for another day, the part that matters is that R700 bits are in the oven now and things appear to be going swimmingly, or at least skatingly if you know what Toronto is like in the winter.
Rough maths puts silicon back in late January, gone through the initial checks by early February, and then given the thumbs up or down. If they are up, look for boards in about 90 days, putting it in May or so. If it is thumbs down, add about 2 months per spin.
Based on RV670 and R680, ATI is on a roll, and the internal process they put in place seem to be the right things at the right times. Based on that and the fact that the new chip is architecturally similar to the older ones, I would think that it will be close to perfect out of the gate. We will know in a month or two. ยต
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Yeah it will be good, but Nvidia will be a little bit better as always.
that misreading was strong as most tech. sites published it, while the roadmaps was only for platforms not technologies or parts !!

the roadmap stated there will be a platform that uses R700 in 2009, and no platform in 2008 will use R700, some sites translated that to R700 being finished only in 2009 !!

about the taping, I already knew that 8 days ago or some thing like that, but even If I said a thing, who will beleieve me over all these misreading tech sites ??
I've already said that misreading in Arabic speacking forum ( arabhardware.com ) at first time it was rumered as they trust me :)
how do you figure its taped?
I wonder how well these drivers are going to work and compatibility with older games. Seems like its going to be a big headache software developers are already clueless about how to code for dual and quad core cpus now gpus. I'm guessing it will all be done in the drivers and the hardware but them drivers always seem to be a bit flaky and multi core gpus seems to be a big leap in complexity.
@az
What do you mean "as always"? ATi beat out the 5, 6, and 7 Nvidia series. Nvidia just recently had a good run with the 8 series.