ATI is working frenetically with its next generation graphics circuit R600 and now that details about NVIDIA’s G80 circuit has appeared many have been questioning ATI’s ability to counter it. G80 is looking very strong and should appear very soon. Except from that, on paper, it seems to carry a huge calculation power with its unified shaders using a memory bus at 384-bit. Paired with GDDR3 memory at 1.8GHz this has resulted in a bandwidth at 86GB/s, you can compare this to Radeon X1950 XTX and its 2.0GHz GDDR4 memory that has a bandwidth of 64GB/s. These figures are nothing compared to what ATI is planning for the R600 though.
Already, today’s Radeon X1xxx generation has an internal memory bus at 512-bit. You can read more about the so called Ring Bus in our review of the X1000 series. Between the core and memory it’s still just 256-bit though. Now rumors have appeared that speak of a 512-bit wide memory bus from the memory controller all the way out to the memories with R600 and this will result in an extreme memory bandwidth. Would ATI use 2.5GHz GDDR4 memory, which rumors state, this would result in a bandwidth of a staggering 160GB/s (!). With a memory buffer at 1GB ATI R600 could be something really extraordinary and we’re really starting to understand why all of those watts are needed with ATI’s coming monster card.
If this would turn out to be correct ATI really has something to battle NVIDIA’s G80 with. The question then is what NVIDIA will do when R600 is launched during the first quarter of 2007. G80 is expected to arrive at the start of month.
