R520 / Radeon X1800 has 321m transistors

R

Radeon350

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/05/ati_radeon_x1000/


ATI's new flagship GPU, the R520 / Radeon X1800 (XL, XT) has 321 m
transistors, compared to:

Nvidia's 302m transistors in G70 / GeForce 7800 GTX,
300+ m transistors in RSX (Nvidia's GPU for Playstation3)
332+ m transistors in Xenos (ATI's GPU for Xbox 360)



that's funny. Nvidia's GeForce 7800 GTX supposedly has 24 pixel
pipelines, while ATI's X1800 has 16 pixel pipelines. so while more
transistors in ATI's GPU? their pipelines have to be beefier than
Nvidia's and ATI has implemented more things like branch prediction and
some threading processor to make its GPU more efficient.
 
J

John Lewis

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/05/ati_radeon_x1000/


ATI's new flagship GPU, the R520 / Radeon X1800 (XL, XT) has 321 m
transistors, compared to:

Nvidia's 302m transistors in G70 / GeForce 7800 GTX,
300+ m transistors in RSX (Nvidia's GPU for Playstation3)
332+ m transistors in Xenos (ATI's GPU for Xbox 360)



that's funny. Nvidia's GeForce 7800 GTX supposedly has 24 pixel
pipelines, while ATI's X1800 has 16 pixel pipelines. so while more
transistors in ATI's GPU? their pipelines have to be beefier than
Nvidia's and ATI has implemented more things like branch prediction and
some threading processor to make its GPU more efficient.

Even a better use for their extra transistors, maybe.............

ATi could have used some of their extra transistors to implement the
Crossfire compositor on-chip in all the GPUs destined for Crossfire
usage in the X1000-series and enable it in the driver software when
required, so that they would not need 2 different boards, one with an
expensive FPGA in their Crossfire setups. And they could have
implemented a nVidia-style bridge for the fast DVI data instead of the
stupid dongle. Because of this master/slave board nonsense, the
X1000-series Crossfire is likely to be a dead horse except at the
lower-performance end of the X1000-family , when Crossfire could be
limply implemented by using two identical (non-Crossfire) video cards
and passing the Crossfire data over the PCIe bus, a la the low-end of
the nVidia 6600 range.

John Lewis
 
B

BS82

John said:
Even a better use for their extra transistors, maybe.............

ATi could have used some of their extra transistors to implement the
Crossfire compositor on-chip in all the GPUs destined for Crossfire
usage in the X1000-series and enable it in the driver software when
required, so that they would not need 2 different boards, one with an
expensive FPGA in their Crossfire setups. And they could have
implemented a nVidia-style bridge for the fast DVI data instead of the
stupid dongle. Because of this master/slave board nonsense, the
X1000-series Crossfire is likely to be a dead horse except at the
lower-performance end of the X1000-family , when Crossfire could be
limply implemented by using two identical (non-Crossfire) video cards
and passing the Crossfire data over the PCIe bus, a la the low-end of
the nVidia 6600 range.

John Lewis

bah!

Ati have a lot of extra transistor becuase we can't compare ati new
pipelines with older architecture...
 

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