ATI R580 taped out

ATI ENGENEERS are working hard to lay to rest the ghosts of the past. The company experienced many problems with the forthcoming R520 but learned from its mistakes. Shifting to 90 nanometre is not an easy thing to do and it takes, time, effort and money. The R520 aka "Fudo" chip was taped out three times until the company managed to get any reasonable yield numbers. The chip was working fine, but you could not reach high speeds with it, that was the problem and only a few chips per wafer actually worked.

The R520 chip is delayed for a whole quarter now and this has given ATI enough time to prepare for its next step, the R580 chip. The R580 is done by a separate team from the one making R520, with both teams working independently.

It's funny enough that R580 chip was taped out a few weeks back and that this time ATI got it right with its first tape out. It is working fine but we are not sure about the yields. If it makes ATI happy, that means that it got much better numbers than with R520.

The R580 won't be just a clock speed upgrade. It will be a slightly different chip with some marchitectural differences but we don't know all the details yet. We don't expect that it will be just have a different number of pipes, it might have a few changes, here and there.

This chip may be ready sooner than anyone expects but ATI will follow its path and launch the R520 first, and after that will go for R580, not before Nvidia announces its G70 Ultra.

We still don't think we will see any products based on R580 before Yule at least, but it makes much more business sense to deliver it even later than that. I guess it will depend how the R520 will fare against the Geforce 7800GTX and G70 Ultra, which will make up ATI's mind on this subject. µ