ATI Prophecies
Pretty soon, the world as we know it is going to end. This has nothing to do with any natural disaster, because I am talking about the computer hardware landscape, and not the Earth. Why? Well, according to ATI's senior VP of marketing, Richard Bergman, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 GPU is the last high-end monolithic "megachip." So... no more single-chip GPUs??? Good question!
According to EETimes , Mr. Bergman said "I predict our competitor will go down the same path for its next GPU once they see this. They have made their last monolithic GPU."
Looking at it closer, he may be right - NVIDIA's GTX 200 GPU has a die size of almost 600mm², because its dimensions are 24X24mm, while the 55nm GPUs from ATI are smaller, with only 16X16mm. The catch? We'll leave power consumption aside, and mention one big factor - pricing, because the less chips fit on a wafer, the more expensive is to produce them, so that's why we'll soon get to see incredible performance from ATI for about $300(I hardly wait!).
In the end, it seems AMD doesn't need to go with large monolithic GPUs. If they may not get the best monolithic GPU for desktop computers, which may not be true anyway, because the current test results look amazing, ATI will end up with the most powerful GPU ready to use in notebooks, while there seems to be "no way this new Nvidia core will be in notebooks this fall," according to Bergman.
...what else should I say? I just have to ask what do you think - will NVIDIA shrink the die size and go with the flow, or keep hanging to those large DirectX 10 GPUs and DDR3, while ATI already stepped into the DirectX 10.1 and GDDR5 era?
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader by FeedBurner.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment