X-bit labs

March 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 10)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 03/15/2004 | 02:11 AM ]

Yes, there’s still some time until the arrival of the NV40 and the R420. Although the R420 has already been showcased to the public, information about this chip is still half-official. As far as we know, we are up to monster chips consisting of 160-210 million transistors each (much more transistors than in current Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 CPUs!). It’s somewhat off the topic, but anyway: graphics chips still cost you much less than central processors.

According to the preliminary info, all this transistor power will be spent to increase the number of pixel pipelines/texturing units, and the NV is rumored to have 16/1 (16 pipelines with 1 TMU per each) bringing another ideology into the GPU design, or 8/2. R420 should be somewhat slimmer than its rival, but more efficient with the 8/2 formula. Well, comparing the current top-end chips like RADEON 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, I can believe that ATI has a more efficient product, but the current advantage won’t count with the next generation of chips.

I think the most interesting detail is not the performance data, but the fact that the NV40 is likely to have the AGP 8x interface. Its PCI Express variant will still be implemented through an external bridge. Of course, that’s not for the lack of trying – NVIDIA seems to be having problems with the PCI Express implementation. On the other hand, this is not a crucial drawback as the next generation of chips will do well enough without the PCI Express. It is not yet certain with ATI Technologies – whether they will launch an AGP 8x R420 and a PCI Express R423, or only the AGP 8x R420 plus an AGP-PCI Express bridge for it, or include both controllers into the R420.

ATI is said to have a chip revision that can be launched into production even today. NVIDIA will have it no sooner than in April. In April NVIDIA is also going to start production of the NV45, which is supposed to be the NV40 plus an integrated PCI Express controller (with some variations in frequencies, probably).

As for manufacture, NVIDIA, or rather its partners, is beset with troubles. As soon as NVIDIA made friends with IBM after some technological problems with TSMC then the Big Blue encountered them, too. The corporation is very slowly introducing its 0.11micron technology, while TSMC, on the contrary, has it right and the order for producing 0.11micron chips has been given back to Taiwan.

These are the global things that happened or are likely to happen in the nearest future. As for particulars, I should say it with regret that Hercules left the graphics card market. They did a good job making high-quality and non-standard products, beyond reference designs – maybe that was the cause of their downfall. The second and last piece of corporative news is about the ambiguous ABIT. On the one hand, this company has become a key partner of ATI, offering graphics cards on RADEON chips, but on the other hand, ABIT is still friendly to NVIDIA, going to unveil an NV40-based card.