RV770 has 800 SPs, breaks 1.2TFLOPS, final clocks

[Andreas G]

Remember how we told you that Eastern sources claimed that RV770 has 800 shader processors, not just 480 shader processors? When we look at the slide presented to us by a reliable source, we can only conclude that they were right. AMD evidently planted the stories of 480 shader processors (it's not uncommon for AMD/ATI to plant stuff). The slide tells us three things about both Radeon HD 4850 and 4870. First of all that they both sport a whopping 800 shader processors, but also the clock frequencies and they're individual calculation capacity measured in FLOPS. We've already told you that Radeon HD 4850 will launch at 625MHz and that AMD will clock the 4870 at at least 100MHz more, the slide says 750MHz.

Each shader shader unit is capable of 2 FLOPS, and since we now have 800 units, this means that Radeon HD 4850 with its 625MHz will hit exactly 1TFLOPS. That should explain why AMD/ATI chose that specific frequency. Radeon HD 4870 with its 750MHz core will have 20% more processing power available and hits 1.2TFLOPS. A decent quad-core processor can do up to 100GFLOPS. This is certainly a slap in NVIDIA's face. AMD's mainstream chip can do more FLOPS than NVIDIA enthusiast chips, and AMD's coming high-end chips will pack twice the FLOPS...

Click to enlarge and get rid of the blur

[Skyguy]

And if prices are kept reasonable, this could put ATI in a good position to challenge Nv's market share.

Good for all of us
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Lian-Li A71B | Q6600 @ 3.5 on TEC/H2O | ASUS Maximus SE X38 | 4gb Corsair Dominators - 8500 | Raptors RAID 0 | 1Tb Barracudas | MSI 8800 Ultra SC | Coolermaster 850w | 2x22" Dell LCD | X-Fi Xtreme | G15 Rev.2 | G5 Rev.2 |

[hsew]

if this is the case then nVidia is screwed. Although, a lot of people on the internet keep saying that this information is fake, and I kinda think it's too good to be true. It just says we got the slide from a "reliable source".

However if this is true, nVidia's in for a RUUUDE awakening. This will be an interesting summer, as the green team's flagship 650 USD card won't have as much shader processing power as ATI's mainstream 150-200 USD card. All we gotta hope for is good drivers I guess.

[Mean Machine]

With the launch drawing close, I wouldn't doubt these slides, to be honest... I'm really hoping for AMD to turn things round, and with the prices and yields I see no real trouble, other than people's reluctancy to buy anything else than NVIDIA cards...
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Man, or woman, or both?
Grandis spiritus, sanctus diavolos

[Delph1]

A lot of people have been fed with planted information as far as I know. Anyone under NDA can't say anything so you will just have to wait and see

//Andreas
_________________
"I'm sort of a postmodern vegetarian, I eat meat ironically"
"You are our Swedish superhero "

Forget everything, knowledge is your enemy, it's only going to make you second-guess yourself."

[Skyguy]

I've been waiting for a good ATI card to feed my Maximus X38......maybe this is it. Must feed the Maximus!!!!
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Lian-Li A71B | Q6600 @ 3.5 on TEC/H2O | ASUS Maximus SE X38 | 4gb Corsair Dominators - 8500 | Raptors RAID 0 | 1Tb Barracudas | MSI 8800 Ultra SC | Coolermaster 850w | 2x22" Dell LCD | X-Fi Xtreme | G15 Rev.2 | G5 Rev.2 |

[hsew]

well, a couple of months ago I did hear that ATI was aiming for double the performance/power consumtion in this new generation vs its last (it would make sense when you look at the transition from the 2900 to the 3870, same performance, half the power consumption) Maybe now they're gonna try a double performance/same power consumption.

Won't this be funny, ATI's mainstream card will have more shader processing power (and obviously lower power consumption) than "envy's" for less than 1/3 the price. Looks like it all comes down to driver quality at this point.

[Delph1]

Bow before me

http://my.ocworkbench.com/2008/amd/AMD_Radeon_HD4850_HD4870_Info/AMD_HD4850_HD4870-1.htm

//Andreas
_________________
"I'm sort of a postmodern vegetarian, I eat meat ironically"
"You are our Swedish superhero "

Forget everything, knowledge is your enemy, it's only going to make you second-guess yourself."

[Mean Machine]

I want a HD4870 badly and fast.
_________________
Man, or woman, or both?
Grandis spiritus, sanctus diavolos

[reaperrr]

3870: 320x775=248000
4850: 800x625=500000
4870: 800x750=600000

That means the 4850 has ~100% and 4870 even has ~142%(!) more theoretical Shaderpower. Of course a part of these additional SPs might be dedicated to AA and Physics, but it's impressive nontheless.

Add the fact that RV770 also has at least twice as many TMUs, much more memory bandwidth and probably heavily improved ROPs, we might see some really impressive performance gains over RV670.

Now the only thing that might sound unrealistic about this is the modest increase in die-size. How could they squeeze additional 480 SPs and presumably additional 16-24 TMUs into only 33% additional transistors/diesize?
When the 800 SP rumor first came up, I discarded it as wrong for that reason.
But I've done some maths and some thinking, and I realized something: Maybe the amount of R600/RV670 transistors that were for mem interface, composition engine (for Crossfire), UVD, on-board audio, the Tesselation engine and ROPs was much higher than we assumed, and eventually the SPs and TMUs were not as transistor-heavy as we thought. Keep in mind everything else except for SPs and TMUs remained more or less the same and was only tweaked a bit.

[Delph1]

The RV770 shaders are extremely small. I remember hearing something over a couple of beers about how they could throw thousands of them into a GPU with ease, but that's not what they want to do right now. They're much, much smaller than the NVIDIA shaders.

The shaders only make up part of the core, we don't know exactly how much, but if I'm not mistaking, the majority of the expanded die-size is not used by the shaders, but the new texture units.

//Andreas
_________________
"I'm sort of a postmodern vegetarian, I eat meat ironically"
"You are our Swedish superhero "

Forget everything, knowledge is your enemy, it's only going to make you second-guess yourself."

[reaperrr]

[Delph1]

If we had a block diagram we could do some guessing, but I'm not sure how they are aligned.
I would assume we're still in for something that's superior to RV670 with RV735 though.

//Andreas
_________________
"I'm sort of a postmodern vegetarian, I eat meat ironically"
"You are our Swedish superhero "

Forget everything, knowledge is your enemy, it's only going to make you second-guess yourself."

[aca]

What do you think: is the RV770 bandwidth limited??

[cizoe]

http://www.madpixelz.net/nv/ Nvidia Promo website ULTRALOL

[Delph1]