ATI Showcased R300

by Anna Filatova
06/12/2002 | 09:18 PM

According to AnandTech site, ATI showcased a solution based on an upcoming R300 chip at Computex Taipei this year.

Unfortunately, the guys didn’t share any benchmarks results yet. The company was simply showing that their new chip with the whole bunch of features (it is claimed to have 8 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs each) could already work stably without crashing (they were running Doom III demo at their test-stand). Moreover, ATI even concealed the manufacturing technology of this working chip sample (they didn’t mention if it was made with 0.15micron or 0.13micron) alongside with its actual working frequency. As for some pictures of the new graphics solution on this chip, it can hardly be of any specific interest, because the graphics card looks very much the same as any other contemporary graphics solution already selling (it could be even a Ti4600 based card, for instance :)

The next picture is of much greater interest to us, to tell the truth.

This picture gives away much more info than the previous one. Its marking says K4D26323RA-GC2A, which means something like: 128Mbit chip (4Mx32) with 2.86ns access time (350MHz with CL=5) packed into a 144-pin FBGA package. This allows us to make two conclusions:

1. ATI R300 based graphics cards will be equipped with 700MHz DDR memory. This is actually, not at all surprising, because there will be even faster memory available in the market by the time the chip starts shipping in mass. For example, 800MHz DDR SDRAM, which Samsung is already sampling for a couple of months.
2. The R300 memory bus is really 256bit wide (just like Matrox Parhelia-512), which is twice as wide as by R200. This conclusion is very simple and logical if we take into account the memory size (128MB), number of chips (8 pieces) and single chip width (32bit). 8 chips x 32bit makes 256bit.