ATi has trouble with R520

ATi seems to have run into some real problems when it comes to its new circuit R520. According to information that Pentarsys’ writer Josh Walrath has gotten his hands on it seems ATi is far from ready to deliver any circuits at all. ATi has sent out a few full working chips to companies that has had private demos, but these numbers are pretty much zero when looking to the big picture. R520 also seems to be suffer from power leakage of the bigger kind which is quite alarming as today’s graphica cards are already quite power consuming. He also discusses Crossfire, but there the tone is a bit more positive.

It all seems to come down to that the design of 520 results in very few fully working circuits per wafer. The circuit is designed with 32 pipelines, all with multiple TMUs (Texture Mapping Unit), but very few actually has 32 working pipelines. Regularly only 16 work and in best case 24. But then you might wonder whether the R500, which is suppose to be located in the Xbox 360, has the same issues, but hopefully ATi will be able to deliver the circuits as it doesn’t have to deliver the best possible product but only reach Microsoft’s minimum requirements.

We simply have to hope for that ATi will be able to find a good working design as we simply don’t need another power consuming moster with cooling that can wake up the dead and with an overclocking potential that is practically negative.

When it comes to Crossfire we can llok forward to better support for more games, but above all better image quality with new and better antialias methods.

Source: Pentarsys